Today’s GalleyCrush is Jennifer Huang’s Return Flight, forthcoming from Milkweed Editions on January 18, 2022.
Perfect pitch: “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.”
First lines: “A crop of deer appears. They kiss / the cheek of my periphery.”
Book buzz: “Jennifer Huang’s compelling poems arise from the mutable realm between speaking and flying, touching and breaking, absence and forgiveness, numbness and desire, everywhere and nowhere, the home of the body—and home. Here, the poem abides even through gradations of silence—the bone in the throat, the tongue both captive and captivated, and love, too, abides, despite striations and separations, even dissolving the veil between the living and the dead. Huang writes, ‘what I know is what I imagine,’ and it is imagination, made manifest in poems that map a blooming selfhood, that fuels the concentric energy of Return Flight.” —Diane Seuss
Cover credit: Art by María Medem, design by Mary Austin Speaker.
Book notes: Paperback, poetry, 96 pages.
Author bio: Jennifer Huang was born in Maryland to Taiwanese immigrants and has since called many places her home. Their poems have appeared in Poetry, the Rumpus, and Narrative, among other publications. They have also received recognition from various organizations, including the Academy of American Poets, Brooklyn Poets, and the North American Taiwan Studies Association. In 2020 Huang earned their MFA in poetry at the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program. They live in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
