Milkweed Editions Return Flight

"Selected by Jos Charles as the winner of the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Return Flight is a lush reckoning: with inheritance, with body, with trauma, with desire-and with the many tendons in between"-- Selected by Jos Charles as the winner of the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Return Flight is a lush reckoning: with inheritance, with body, with trauma, with desire&;and with the many tendons in between. When Return Flight asks &;what name / do you crown yourself,&; Huang answers with many. Textured with mountains&;a folkloric goddess-prison, Yushan, mother, men, self&;and peppered with shapeshifting creatures, spirits, and gods, the landscape of Jennifer Huang&;s poems is at once mystical and fleshy, a &;myth a mess of myself.&; Sensuously, Huang depicts each of these not as things to claim but as topographies to behold and hold. Here, too, is another kind of mythology. Set to the music of &;beating hearts / through objects passed down,&; the poems travel through generations&;among Taiwan, China, and America&;cataloging familial wounds and beloved stories. A grandfather&;s smile shining through rain, baby bok choy in a child&;s bowl, a slap felt decades later&;the result is a map of a present-day life, reflected through the past. Return Flight is a thrumming debut that teaches us how history harrows and heals, often with the same hand; how touch can mean &;purple&; and &;blue&; as much as it means intimacy; and how one might find a path toward joy not by leaving the past in the past, but by &;(keeping a] hand on these memories, / to feel them to their ends.&; Autorid: Jennifer Huang