In Sai Im-Iam’s heartbreaking debut collection, we’re introduced to a speaker born as cataclysm. Fragmentation, rebirth, regeneration, and creation haunt these poems strong enough to converse with such great poetic voices as Lucille Clifton in her “Shapeshifter” poems, and as Gwendolyn Brooks, to whom she responds, “We / learn white.” Sai Im-Iam is a woman who deserves to be recognized, and I mean that quite literally—because as an immigrant child in America with “a ‘Valid for Work Only’” card, her community failed her in all the most important ways a child can be failed. “I was an immigrant daughter with a middle school education,” she writes in the collection’s third poem as the narrative body of this book builds a complex backstory for a poet whose lyrical voice (Thank goodness, she is now voiced!) will move the reader to tears. Evocative details of personal experience unspool in such skilled and beautiful poetic lines as “My mom was there with light earthen eyes, / a gentle smile, and a large pot of jok / to cure illness of the body or heart,” and:
A kid, with nowhere to go, standing in an open,
grassy plain of nowhere Kansas
with only one match”.
Sai Im-Iam, a woman who has had to go out with “lanterns looking for [her]self”; who has created toys of stars—rocking horse, flowers and pearls—“in the night sky where the stars did more than survive,” has written poems to transform a violent obscene world. In these poems she claims her place amongst American letters.”
–Laura Lee Washburn, author of “Arteries,” “The Book of Stolen Images,” “This Good Warm Place, and “Watching the Contortionists”
.
“With the care she uses to describe how one of her poem’s characters prepares traditional Thai rice, this whole collection is seasoned with precision along with a keen eye for important, representative, cultural detail. This whole collection wafts with that enticing aroma and ushers in a new strong voice—like a searchlight’s strong cone of light up through the clouds, a signal from a new, promising, illuminated strain in American poetry.”
–Kevin Rabas, Poet Laureate of Kansas, 2017-2019
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.