About the Book
The poetic memoir Evaporation is a pilgrim's journey through China, France and America to capture fugitive moments and preserve each like a poppy seed in amber.
Evaporation is a gift. Claire Hsu Accomando writes with wonder, precision, and cinematic wisdom. The remembrances and stories of China, France, and America are rendered with tenderness, intelligence, and joy. What a remarkable life there is inside this book, the poet's expansive heart.
--Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate
In Accomando's luminous poetic memoir, she shows us the world shaped by wind. People, like flower petals, and scents, are wind-borne: relocated, dislocated, and exiled by war, as well as by the work of peace-making and the human search for stability. Voluptuous with colors and textures, this book of family memory is a vivid gift to the reader that celebrates lived experience recounted with precision before it can slip from our grasp like vapor.
-Barbara Brinson Curiel, Mexican Jenny and Other Poems
Accomando pushes at what the memoir can be across forms: prose, poetry, the new archival document, and photography. The choices she deftly makes serve to propel the work, carrying us through observations of beloved kin as well as the distant and yet ever close presence of evil on their lives across place and time. How they persist and resist is always through love: the love of a name written on a note pinned to the bundle of an abandoned child, the love in a distant grave that remains unvisited physically and yet ever tended in the heart and mind, the love of committing to sharing a life towards a common destination. In these times of upheaval and tumult, we need this exemplar. I will be teaching this book for decades.
-Raina J. León, black god mother this body
As editor of Atlanta Review, it was my great privilege to publish spectacular poems like "Evaporation" and "Wild Goose Pagoda" by Claire Hsu Accomando. This book lets us enter the extraordinary life, lived in three very different worlds, of the poet behind these profound and heartwarming poems.
-Dan Veach, Elephant Water and Lunchboxes
A remarkable study of language, identity, migration, relation, loss, and how we continue on.
-Janelle Adsit, Unremitting Entrance
About the Author :
Claire Hsu Accomando was born in Switzerland to a Chinese father and French-Armenian mother. She spent her early childhood in rural France, separated from her father who was in China during WWII. Her memories of the war years are collected in her memoir, Love and Rutabaga (St. Martin's Press), released in a French translation in 2020 (L'Harmattan). Reunited after the war, the family moved to New York when her father joined the United Nations. While Accomando graduated from NYU with a science degree, she was always drawn more to the arts. She taught History through Art and English as a Second Language in Southern California for many years. Her poetry has appeared in journals including Atlanta Review, Mudfish, Toyon Multilingual Literary Magazine, Slab, and Bullets into Bells. Her artwork has appeared in Three Hearts: An Anthology of Cephalopod Poetry, Moon Water: An Anthology by Spell Jar Press, and JustArts: Call & Response. She also has published nonfiction in Ararat, Critical Flame, Women in World History, The Christian Science Monitor, Artweek, and other publications. Claire Hsu Accomando lives in Bonita, California, and defines poetry as distillation: you start out with a truckload of potatoes and end up with a shot of vodka.
Review :
Evaporation is a gift. Claire Hsu Accomando writes with wonder, precision, and cinematic wisdom. The remembrances and stories of China, France, and America are rendered with tenderness, intelligence, and joy. What a remarkable life there is inside this book, the poet's expansive heart.
--Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate
In Accomando's luminous poetic memoir, she shows us the world shaped by wind. People, like flower petals, and scents, are wind-borne: relocated, dislocated, and exiled by war, as well as by the work of peace-making and the human search for stability. Voluptuous with colors and textures, this book of family memory is a vivid gift to the reader that celebrates lived experience recounted with precision before it can slip from our grasp like vapor.
-Barbara Brinson Curiel, Mexican Jenny and Other Poems
Accomando pushes at what the memoir can be across forms: prose, poetry, the new archival document, and photography. The choices she deftly makes serve to propel the work, carrying us through observations of beloved kin as well as the distant and yet ever close presence of evil on their lives across place and time. How they persist and resist is always through love: the love of a name written on a note pinned to the bundle of an abandoned child, the love in a distant grave that remains unvisited physically and yet ever tended in the heart and mind, the love of committing to sharing a life towards a common destination. In these times of upheaval and tumult, we need this exemplar. I will be teaching this book for decades.
-Raina J. León, black god mother this body
As editor of Atlanta Review, it was my great privilege to publish spectacular poems like "Evaporation" and "Wild Goose Pagoda" by Claire Hsu Accomando. This book lets us enter the extraordinary life, lived in three very different worlds, of the poet behind these profound and heartwarming poems.
-Dan Veach, Elephant Water and Lunchboxes
A remarkable study of language, identity, migration, relation, loss, and how we continue on.
-Janelle Adsit, Unremitting Entrance
