Border vista Poems

The opening poem in Liu's prize-winning first collection, "Ars Poetica in a Dream Language," elegantly and indelibly marks the intricate parameters of this piercing cross-cultural inquiry. The poems that follow hopscotch through signal childhood moments as a seven-year-old girl's mother leaves their ancient Chinese city, as the girl's father and grandparents care for her, as she takes English classes, and as she suddenly experiences a "double-edged feeling" that will define her and her life as she immigrates to America. Liu's poems are confiding, lithe, and vital, pulling one urgently forward. And yet each line, vivid and visceral in its imagery and emotion, is meticulously composed, the internal rhythms and rhymes exquisitely expressive, the range of implication extending as the story moves into the shadows and light of the narrator's adulthood. The title poem is set along the U.S./Canada border, and borders and perspectives take many forms as Liu contrasts languages, countries, memories, and actualities, incisively tracing the blurring of night and day, aloneness and connection, interior and exterior, the human and the wild, undocumented and documented. "That skinless feeling. Your own endlessly permeable self."