Return Flight : : Poems

Locations
Call Number: 811.6 Hu
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	811.6 Hu	4-week checkout	On Shelf

"Ballard Spahr Prize for poetry" -- cover.
"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"-- Provided by publisher.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Summary / Annotation
Table of Contents
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Author Notes

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Incredible poetry collection submitted by redwood on August 7, 2023, 12:51pm These poems are necessary, reflective, searching, and full of heart at every turn. Jennifer also plays with form in beautiful ways—more traditional forms like haiku and tanka, lesser-knowns like the zuihitsu, and their own twists, like different kinds of concrete poems.

This collection ranges from Maryland to Michigan to Taiwan, contouring environments both quotidian and magical, sometimes at once. The speaker goes to Lowe’s; alternatively, at the beach, a sika turns into a shark. Many of the poems center on trips to Taiwan or Huang’s family history. I don’t really have favorite poems in this immaculate collection, but the longish “Zuihitsu for Yushan” is stunning. Elsewhere, they consider Taiwan’s period of martial law and reimagine folk legends.

Violence, mostly domestic, lurks throughout the collection, but quietly. It is impactful, but never sensational. The speaker’s interiority, methodical yet soft, guides all examinations of difficult topics. They are introspective, in some ways a tender child revisiting old wounds. The wounds aren’t completely fresh, yet the speaker also doesn’t speak with a resolved wisdom. These poems live in periods of becoming.