Bøker i Juniper Prize for Poetry-serien

"Chamber after Chamber is about what fractures, fixes, and refills the hearts of two girls as they grow into women. A loose narrative in three sections, the poems follow a speaker and her cousin through their hardscrabble, backwoods childhood to their separation-both physical and emotional-as adults. From the make-believe apocalypses and cut-and-paste valentines of elementary school to the stadium-seating classrooms and multiplexes of southern China, our speaker tries to leave the shame and dysfunction of her family behind"--

"Crafted with lines from her late father's letters, Jennifer Tseng's Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive is a portrait of an immigrant, a rootless person whose unspoken loss-that of his native geography, family, traditions, language-underlies every word. Though her father's first language was Mandarin, for more than twenty years he wrote these letters in English, in theory so that she could understand them. His sentences are riddled with errors, some nearly unintelligible. Lines from his letters appear as titles and are scattered throughout the poems, blending voices of father and daughter. This collection enacts what it means to lose someone and commune with them simultaneously-the paradox of grief and all it gives us"--