Return Flight-Fast Shipping

Description

Title: Return Flight

Author: Jennifer Huang

ISBN: 9781571315281

Publisher: Milkweed Editions

Published: 2022

Binding: Paperback

Language: English

Condition Note: New from the publisher

Publisher :
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.
When Return Flight asks “what name / do you crown yourself,” Huang answers with many. Textured with mountains–a folkloric goddess-prison, Yushan, mother, men, self–and peppered with shapeshifting creatures, spirits, and gods, the landscape of Jennifer Huang’s poems is at once mystical and fleshy, a “myth a mess of myself.” Sensuously, Huang depicts each of these not as things to claim but as topographies to behold and , too, is another kind of mythology. Set to the music of “beating hearts / through objects passed down,” the poems travel through generations–among Taiwan, China, and America–cataloging familial wounds and beloved stories. A grandfather’s smile shining through rain, baby bok choy in a child’s bowl, a slap felt decades later–the result is a map of a present-day life, reflected through the past.Return Flight is a thrumming debut that teaches us how history harrows and heals, often with the same hand; how touch can mean “purple” and “blue” as much as it means intimacy; and how one might find a path toward joy not by leaving the past in the past, but by “[keeping a] hand on these memories, / to feel them to their ends.”