Displaced by Selina Li Bi

Selina Li Bi ’s Displaced is an evocative, lyrical sequence of poems as delicately palpable as ink on rice paper.  Filled with reminiscence and yearning for lost people, objects, and landscapes,

Li Bi ’s adept and haunting rhythms and images transform a past both real and imagined into a mythology that’s ever present: only this, she tells us, only this, and this, and this. What might have been exotic tourism in lesser hands is transformed into a tapestry of instances that arcs emotionally like a series of remembered dreams. Poems worth reading and rereading and keeping near to hand.

–Alan Davis, author of So Bravely Vegetative and co-editor of Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Bob Dylan

The breathtaking poems in Displaced depict an epic journey hidden in plain sight. In navigating the intricately braided histories of home, language, and loss, they lovingly and longingly illustrate – beyond the shadow of a doubt – how the eerie shadows of the past come to make us who we are. As Li Bi imagines a place where “your lips speak / a language / my tongue / longs to know,” we come to know intimately a deep and ancient truth: the oceans between us are also within us. Mabuhay, fellow traveler, you have arrived. You are here.

–Kevin Carollo, author of the chapbook Elizabeth Gregory

“There is a beautiful solitude in Selina’s poems, full of yearning and ancestral memories. Her lyrical poems are silk petals unfurling. Like tiny flames burning on the tip of your tongue, these poems will stay with you long after reading.”

–Denise Lajimodiere, author of Dragonfly Dance, Bitter Tears, Thunderbird, His Feathers Were Chains, Stringing Rosaries: The History, the Unforgivable and the Healing of Northern Plains American Indian Boarding School Survivors, Josie Dances