Drawn from her Taiwanese childhood, life in Taiwan as well as the anecdotes of Chinese and Hakka ancestors, Sarah Yihsuan Tso’s debut collection of poems written in English dwells on a vast array of topics such as bias, culture, suffering, luck, philosophy of life, Christianity, Buddhism, sexism, poetics, beauty, ethnic and gender groups, manhood, womanhood, environmentalism, geopolitics, migration, immigration, nature, and the inexorable fate of mortality. Written in an audacious, refined, and unique language par excellence, the book wrenches sapience from troves of dazing and memorable lines like: “The fate of concession is worn daily” in “a land ceded from the Dragon King, the Eastern Neptune.” “In this country, women and children are / conjoined twins.”
