Motherlands

Chosen by Louise Glck for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, this engrossing debut interrogates history, identity, and the power of poetry to elucidate both.Motherlands opens with a child drawn early to poetry. In summer I write. Two lines at a time, two vying souls / running up the wall. The collection follows this speaker-poet through a childhood in post-Maoist China and an eventual move to the United States, laying bare cultural and linguistic tensions in both historical and modern settings. He cites Chinese laborers toiling in American factoriesan echo of the brutalities endured by those who constructed the Transatlantic Railroadand speaks to anxieties around belonging, assimilation, and identity. If I forget one character a day, he writes. I will have forgotten Chinese / by the end of 2042.In these attentive, imaginative poems, Weijia Pan questions the artists dutyhis dutyas a chronicler of truth, especially through issues of displacement and global injustice. What can the poet do but observe? And yet, in unpacking ancestral traumas connected to Maoist China and modern-day bigotry exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, he still finds himself turning to art as a way to understand both the self and the world at large. Through elegant juxtapositions, Pan crafts an emotional world that is at once regional and universalLi Bai and Du Fu sit alongside Glenn Gould and Sviatoslav Richter, pepper used to bless new roads is repurposed in the mace used against protesters, two languages compete on a single tongue. Lyrical and visionary, this collection embodies poetrys capacity to ground us, teach us, and change us.