Rooted in the classical tradition of the Chinese “reversible” poem, 回 / Return is engaged in the act of looking back—toward an imagined homeland and a childhood of suburban longing, through migratory passages, departures, and etymologies, and into the various holes and voids that appear in the telling and retelling of history. The poems ask: What is feeling? What is melancholy? Can language translate either?
About the Author :
Emily Lee Luan is the author of 回 / Return, a winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and forthcoming with the87press in the UK, and I Watch the Boughs (2021), selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2021, American Poetry Review, Lithub, and elsewhere. She teaches at Adelphi University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Review :
Luan’s meditative debut explores the Taiwanese diasporic experience through poems rich with vivid imagery, imagination, and candor that draw from the classical tradition of the Chinese “reversible” poem. —Publishers Weekly
A book of both startling intimacy and formal excitement, neither compromising the other, 回 / Return is an assured and moving debut that navigates the murk (and heft) of the past, dissatisfied with easy nostalgia. —Wendy Xu, BOMB Magazine
There are an infinite number of things to say about Emily Lee Luan’s virtuosic 回 / Return... [the poems] are informed, inherently, by separation and distance; by missing, mourning, melancholy; by migration, exile; by the desire to return; by the impossibility of returning; by the disappearance of the past in the simultaneously centrifugal and centripetal force of the present. —Brandon Shimoda, Poetry Society of America
Luan’s poetic reconstructions of the past vibrate with grace and lucidity... Her lyric transparency reminds us of the porousness of language, how our reception is what gives the poem signification, how necessary we are to making it live. —Angie Sijun Lou, American Poetry Review
Luan experiments with language and poetic form, blending the lyric, narrative, and visual to create poems that resist translation. This collection insists on fragmentation and altered realities; the self is muddled and intertwined within a greater ancestral history. —Sophia Chong, Adroit
Parting, sinking, gasping. —Ms. Magazine
Luan does not let the forms contain her, but instead carefully leverages each individual form to energize her verse. —Wen Eckelberg, International Examiner
