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mary_soon_lee's review against another edition
This poetry collection won second place in the 2017 Elgin Awards for best speculative poetry book. Despite that, for me at least, most of the poems have more of a mainstream slant than a fantastical one. I particularly liked the pervasive presence of birds, animals, nature, often with precise details (a duck's seed-like eyes, the fact that a humpback whale's milk is pink).
The poems also draw on the author's experience as an Asian American (daughter of Vietnamese immigrants). I'm a half-Asian American immigrant myself, so her experiences, though different in many ways from my own, caught my attention.
The poems are clear, at least on a surface level (I may well have missed a bunch of allusions), often striking, sometimes brave, and at times very moving. While I marked 17 of the 47 poems as standing out to me, the one that returns to me as I write this is "The Patient." Jenna Le is a doctor and I don't know whether this first-person poem is invented, autobiographical, or somewhere in between, but I do know that I found it both poignant and memorable.
Recommended.
About my reviews: I try to review every book I read, including those that I don't end up enjoying. The reviews are not scholarly, but just indicate my reaction as a reader, reading being my addiction. I am miserly with 5-star reviews; 4 stars means I liked a book very much; 3 stars means I liked it; 2 stars means I didn't like it (though often the 2-star books are very popular with other readers and/or are by authors whose other work I've loved). In the case of poetry books, for various reasons, I often omit a rating altogether.
The poems also draw on the author's experience as an Asian American (daughter of Vietnamese immigrants). I'm a half-Asian American immigrant myself, so her experiences, though different in many ways from my own, caught my attention.
The poems are clear, at least on a surface level (I may well have missed a bunch of allusions), often striking, sometimes brave, and at times very moving. While I marked 17 of the 47 poems as standing out to me, the one that returns to me as I write this is "The Patient." Jenna Le is a doctor and I don't know whether this first-person poem is invented, autobiographical, or somewhere in between, but I do know that I found it both poignant and memorable.
Recommended.
About my reviews: I try to review every book I read, including those that I don't end up enjoying. The reviews are not scholarly, but just indicate my reaction as a reader, reading being my addiction. I am miserly with 5-star reviews; 4 stars means I liked a book very much; 3 stars means I liked it; 2 stars means I didn't like it (though often the 2-star books are very popular with other readers and/or are by authors whose other work I've loved). In the case of poetry books, for various reasons, I often omit a rating altogether.
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