Jennifer Tseng’s new book Red Flower, White Flower (Marick Press, 2013), winner of the 2012 Marick Press Poetry Prize, is a bilingual volume featuring Chinese translations by Mengying Han and Aaron Crippen alongside Tseng’s English originals. Her first book The Man With My Face (The Asian American Writers' Workshop, 2005) won the AAWW National Poetry Manuscript Competition and a […]
Darkness was a foil for the problem. A ship without power does float. Without light, without fuel you can get there. Float. Listen. The tongues of the waves, lapping like dogs our steel vessel. Some days the echoes of engines. Always the current, always the wind. Always the land as a limit, a hand. Darkness […]
I could not tell the real leaves from the leaves of jade you made me, such was their superior craftsmanship. Like real leaves, they never woke me with their light. Like real leaves they looked plucked, fallen, torn from a living tree. Like real leaves, their colors changed with actual time. There was no state […]
Like foxgloves, like a coat mending itself in a dove’s night, ascending and descending under a bell-shaped light, or as one sees at the threshold of the mind’s immortal view the yellow house of childhood unhewn, its new half-door and windows now wandered from the past, sunlit, ample, shadowed by trees whose leaves are keys […]
That I have two mothers is a natural fact more difficult to explain. All who ask deserve an explanation. All who ask inquire about my birth. Whose body was it housed me? Whose body shot me forth into the light? Both! I say emphatically. This is the terror of faith. But why dwell on origins? […]
There once was a boy who loved his father so much that he called him “Mother.” What did he call his mother? I can’t tell you that, I don’t know. Did he call her “Father?” I told you I can’t tell you, I don’t know! I can only tell you what I know: that the […]
for Nani What is it keeps you flying (a thousand miles in all, a garland adorning the earth) when one of you falls, a scarlet flower upon his breast, when one’s hurt wing becomes a rose of white upon the plains of snow below? Oh collection of rapidly beating hearts, you of the circular journey, […]
One vermillion poppy in a clover field. Rain the field drinks you drink. Sun that lights you lights the field. The beasts trample you, the beasts ignore you as food. They are like pandas who only want bamboo. Though you grow in their sloe, cow-shaped shadows, You will never be slung by their continental tongues, […]