Poetry Collections for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Poetic History and Recommendations for AAPI Heritage Month
Dear read poetry friends,
Family, community, history, and change. Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month reminds us more than ever of the crucial contributions of AAPI poets to U.S. literature and the need to support contemporary writers. Organizations such as Kundiman and the Asian American Writer’s Workshop can help readers discover the ever-growing wealth of AAPI poets in contemporary literature.
To kick off this month, we’ve compiled a few recommendations for recent collections from Asian American and Pacific Islander poets. This list is not exhaustive, but instead a launchpad to return to all year long.
West: A Translation by Paisley Rekdal
On the walls of Angel Island Immigration Station is an elegy carved in Chinese, written during the years of the Chinese Exclusion Act. The poem is a memorial for one of the many detainees during this time who committed suicide when denied entrance. Rekdal’s collection weaves poetry and essays through the history of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the majority-Chinese labor force that was essential to constructing the transcontinental railroad. The poem journeys across the history of the transcontinental railroad’s construction for its 150th anniversary, and chronicles the losses and labor that laid its rails.
Ask the Brindled by No’u Revilla
An intergenerational reclamation of the narratives imposed on Indigenous and queer Hawaiians, Ask the Brindled is a collection of stories, traditions, and legends. This collection holds the Hawaiian word “mo’o” at its center, Revilla’s definitions and engagements with it shaping her verse. Preoccupied with the body, with skin, and with family legacy, these poems flesh out the connections that tie sovereignty and self in a decolonial critique. This collection glimmers with the mythos and material culture that weaves the history of the Kingdom of Hawai’i with contemporary experiences of queer love and grief.
To Compare by Xuela Zhang
Released on April 28th this year, this collection from Xuela Zhang is a contemporary meditation on translation and home. With vibrant prose, this debut explores the age of globalization, social media, and Chinese-American relations. Born and raised in China, Zhang received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University and PhD from Washington University in St. Louis, writing both in English and Chinese. In this collection, Zhang maps a course through transnational life, where one’s existence must be navigated and re-navigated in the contexts of both here and away, of the home of one language and the home of another.
Amphibian by Joseph O. Legaspi
In Amphibian, Filipino American poet Joseph O. Legaspi searches for the meaning of home and the landscape of his own identity on a journey through the elements and time. Legaspi’s poems in this collection explore the idea of “amphibious living,” the ability to adapt and flourish in varying geographies. In the context of immigrant and queer experience, these poems draw on amphibious living to map a landscape of belonging.
Tree of Knowledge by Victoria Chang
Beginning with the image of a eucalyptus street on Victoria Chang’s street being felled by the violent ripping of a chainsaw, this collection reckons with what is lost and what is left behind. In the heart of this collection is the long poem “Eureka,” which examines the violent 1885 expulsion of Chinese Americans from the California town by that name. This book refuses to forget, with images tracing through like ghosts un-silenced. Chang’s collection engages with ideas of selfhood and loss across nature and art. Tracing through the words and works of artists such as Pablo Picasso, Hilma af Klint, and Joan Mitchell, Tree of Knowledge engages deeply with art and the world.
Poem of the Week
Each week, I feature a poem under our monthly theme at the end of the Substack article, with the opportunity for a subscriber to submit a poem along that theme and to be featured on our page. Send us a direct message on Substack to be considered! This May, we’ll be highlighting the theme of change.
“First Light” by Chen Chen
I like to say we left at first light
with Chairman Mao himself chasing us in a police car,
my father fighting him off with firecrackers,
even though Mao was already over a decade
dead, & my mother says all my father did
during the Cultural Revolution was teach math,
which he was not qualified to teach, & swim & sunbathe
around Piano Island, a place I never read about
in my American textbooks, a place everybody in the family
says they took me to, & that I loved.
What is it, to remember nothing, of what one loved?
To have forgotten the faces one first kissed?
They ask if I remember them, the aunts, the uncles,
& I say Yes it’s coming back, I say Of course,
when it’s No not at all, because when I last saw them
I was three, & the China of my first three years
is largely make-believe, my vast invented country,
my dream before I knew the word “dream,”
my father’s martial arts films plus a teaspoon-taste
of history. I like to say we left at first light,
we had to, my parents had been unmasked as the famous
kung fu crime-fighting couple of the Southern provinces,
& the Hong Kong mafia was after us. I like to say
we were helped by a handsome mysterious Northerner,
who turned out himself to be a kung fu master.
I don’t like to say, I don’t remember crying.
No embracing in the airport, sobbing. I don’t remember
feeling bad, leaving China.
I like to say we left at first light, we snuck off
on some secret adventure, while the others were
still sleeping, still blanketed, warm
in their memories of us.
What do I remember of crying? When my mother slapped me
for being dirty, diseased, led astray by Western devils,
a dirty, bad son, I cried, thirteen, already too old,
too male for crying. When my father said Get out,
never come back, I cried & ran, threw myself into night.
Then returned, at first light, I don’t remember exactly
why, or what exactly came next. One memory claims
my mother rushed into the pink dawn bright
to see what had happened, reaching toward me with her hands,
& I wanted to say No. Don’t touch me.
Another memory insists the front door had simply been left
unlocked, & I slipped right through, found my room,
my bed, which felt somehow smaller, & fell asleep, for hours,
before my mother (anybody) seemed to notice.
I’m not certain which is the correct version, but what stays with me
is the leaving, the cry, the country splintering.
It’s been another five years since my mother has seen her sisters,
her own mother, who recently had a stroke, who has trouble
recalling who, why. I feel awful, my mother says,
not going back at once to see her. But too much is happening here.
Here, she says, as though it’s the most difficult,
least forgivable English word.
What would my mother say, if she were the one writing?
How would her voice sound? Which is really to ask, what is
my best guess, my invented, translated (Chinese-to-English,
English-to-English) mother’s voice? She might say:
We left at first light, we had to, the flight was early,
in early spring. Go, my mother urged, what are you doing,
waving at me, crying? Get on that plane before it leaves without you.
It was spring & I could smell it, despite the sterile glass
& metal of the airport—scent of my mother’s just-washed hair,
of the just-born flowers of fields we passed on the car ride over,
how I did not know those flowers were already
memory, how I thought I could smell them, boarding the plane,
the strange tunnel full of their aroma, their names
I once knew, & my mother’s long black hair—so impossible now.
Why did I never consider how different spring could smell, feel,
elsewhere? First light, last scent, lost
country. First & deepest severance that should have
prepared me for all others.Until next week,
Happy Writing!