Awakening to histories personal and social, Conversation Among Stones is a meditation on memory and identity.
Through fields of wild grass, restless seascapes, and cities tinged with sand, Willie Lin's debut collection of poetry questions what can remain and what must be pared away in our search for truth. Conversation Among Stones speaks both to the inanimate-misremembered histories, photographs, the dead-and to the voices in our daily lives that reverberate with disagreement and confusion. Punctuated by doubt and resistant to easy transformations, these poems listen and revise. With striking restraint and simultaneous abundance, these poems attempt to reconcile the desire for answers with the necessity of not knowing.
Turn by turn, this collection catalogues moments of approach, fervour, and strife and carries us into a profound quest for understanding: "And that was one conviction: / that we must be to one another / what the world is not / to us."
***
In the dream I was abducted, I thought sleepwould save me. That's how dumb I was, how mulish.If you so much as make one sound.- TO YOU AND FOR YOUR
***
(Boa Editions, 7 December 2023, e-book, 96 pages, ARC from the publisher via Edelweiss)
***
***
I was impressed by Conversations Among Stones. It's hard to believe this is a debut collection as the poems are so good, so powerful. The poems are all hugely enjoyable, impressive, resonating and demand your attention from the first letter through to the last. These are not simple poems, read in a few moment and easily forgotten. They are powerful, incredible at times. I loved them all a little bit. I loved the imagery, how the poems came to life and consumed me. I also liked the range of themes and subject matter. This is a fantastic collection of poetry.