{"product_id":"motherlands-poems-9781639551132","title":"Motherlands: Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eChosen by Louise Gl?ck for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, this engrossing debut interrogates history, identity, and the power of poetry to elucidate both.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eMotherlands \u003c\/i\u003eopens with a child drawn early to poetry. \"In summer I write. Two lines at a time, two vying souls \/ running up the wall.\" The collection follows this speaker-poet through a childhood in post-Maoist China and an eventual move to the United States, laying bare cultural and linguistic tensions in both historical and modern settings. He cites Chinese laborers toiling in American factories--an echo of the brutalities endured by those who constructed the Transatlantic Railroad--and speaks to anxieties around belonging, assimilation, and identity. \"If I forget one character a day,\" he writes. \"I will have forgotten Chinese \/ by the end of 2042.\"\u003c\/p\u003eIn these attentive, imaginative poems, Weijia Pan questions the artist's duty--his duty--as a chronicler of truth, especially through issues of displacement and global injustice. What can the poet do but observe? And yet, in unpacking ancestral traumas connected to Maoist China and modern-day bigotry exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, he still finds himself turning to art as a way to understand both the self and the world at large. Through elegant juxtapositions, Pan crafts an emotional world that is at once regional and universal--Li Bai and Du Fu sit alongside Glenn Gould and Sviatoslav Richter, pepper used to bless new roads is repurposed in the mace used against protesters, two languages compete on a single tongue. Lyrical and visionary, this collection embodies poetry's capacity to ground us, teach us, and change us.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeijia Pan\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of \u003ci\u003eMotherlands\u003c\/i\u003e, selected by Louise Gl?ck for the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. A poet and translator from Shanghai, China, his poems have appeared in \u003ci\u003eAGNI\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eBoulevard\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eCopper Nickel\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eGeorgia Review\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eNew Ohio Review\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eNinth Letter\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003ePoetry Daily\u003c\/i\u003e, and elsewhere. He is a third-year MFA at the University of Houston, where he is a winner of the Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Milkweed Editions","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50889906127122,"sku":"9781639551132","price":15.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_2098d270-3f78-4c8a-a9cb-2bb2233936c6.jpg?v=1738165380","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/motherlands-poems-9781639551132","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}