“YOU AND I, A LIKELY OBJECTIVE”

A review of ⧈/Return by Emily Lee Luan

Books Nightboat Books, 2023 paperback, $17.95, 132 pages Emily Lee Luan’s stunning debut poetry collection, ⧈/RETURN, opens with the ancient Chinese glyph for ‘return,’ calligraphed by Luan’s mother. In a style recorded in the Eastern Han Dynasty, the spiral curvature appears distinct against the version simplified circa Cultural Revolution, one square interlocked inside another, ⧈. Much of Luan’s collection traces the cartography of an immigrant’s desire to recurse to the beginning, scouring for the source of an inexplicable sadness: “When my Sorrow was born, I held it, a dark pearl spit from its shell, and I remembered the salt that had rounded it, centuries ago, before I even had a mouth” (6). Luan’s collection explores the contours of this unknowability, whose faces and forms endure in the void of the past: “When I…

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The American Poetry Review (Digital) - 1 Issue, November/December 2023

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