Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, chronicles a family's wartime survival, immigration, and heirloom trauma through the lens of food, or the lack thereof. Through the vehicle of recipe, butchery, and dinner table poems, the collection negotiates the myriad ways diasporic communities comfort and name themselves in other nations, as well as the ways cuisine is inextricably linked to occupation, transmission, and survival. Dwelling on the personal as much as the historical, Some Are Always Hungry traces the lineage of the speaker's place in history and diaspora through mythmaking and cooking, which is to say, conjuring.
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At the night markets, women peddle their prices, shout in swift Cantonese over gurgling tanks ALL FEMALE
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(@UnivNebPress, 1 September 2020, ebook, 66 pages, copy from @edelweiss_squad and voluntarily reviewed)
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This is my first time reading the poet. I really wanted to read the collection because of the intriguing title and gorgeous cover. I made a good choice as this is an excellent collection of poetry. I enjoyed every word and every line of every poem. The powerful collection explores immigration and cultural clashes through food, cooking, poverty, abuse, identity, racism, survival and being a woman. The poems explore culture and cultural boundaries and the difficulties of trying to live between two different worlds. These poems are beautiful, startling and even gut-wrenching at times. An impressive collection. Among the best poems are the title poem, All Female, Bone Soup, I Revisit Myself In 1996, Yellow Fever, Fish Head Soup and Aubade.
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