Grace H. Zhou • Soil Called a Country • E-book

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Light and dark green lines as if a topographic map with the title background in sunflower yellow.

Soil Called a Country • Print + E-book

Summary

Weaving botanical epistles with dreamscapes, road trips, and hauntings, Soil Called a Country reimagines the American West through personal, familial, and historical experiences of the Chinese diaspora. In her debut chapbook selected for the 2023 Emerging Poets Series, poet and anthropologist Grace H. Zhou probes what it means to make a home as an immigrant in a settler colonial nation. Through a speculative poetics of repair, she asks: How to tread softly, dream otherwise, create space for our elsewheres?

Details

Praise

“These formally varied poems traverse diverse landscapes, cross continents and oceans that are haunted by history’s forgotten ghosts. ‘We folded the past like a secret / inheritance,’ Zhou writes in the opening poem, before reanimating this hidden past. Soil Called a Country is a stirring excavation of loss and desire, inherited traumas and dreams. It is also a reclamation of home and humanity for some of the unnamed, voiceless spirits that litter our history—the Chinese immigrants who struggled to make a life in a harsh new land, including countless women nicknamed China Mary and the victims of the LA Chinatown massacre of 1871. An anthropologist as well as a poet, Zhou understands better than most the importance of this unearthing. In the closing poem, she writes, ‘To reimagine is to remember. / To feed is to keep alive.’ Soil Called a Country remembers those whom the dominant culture would forget and, in doing so, keeps their dreams alive.”
        —Jenny Qi, author of Focal Point

“Here is a poet skilled and perceptive in language as a forager, invoking what is timeless, ancient, and immediate: the life cycles of plants and the preservation of knowledge and care between generations and relations. Through a wide display (and reclamation) of poetic forms, violent histories, and the losses marked by racially-targeted erasure and fracture, Zhou provides remedy. Where there is starvation, there is satiation. Where there is archived language defining immigrants solely for their labor and utility, there is gesture to holistic remembrance, ‘un-bending their backs.’ This is the travel narrative—or rather, a rumination that crosses geographies and time—I’ve been waiting for. Zhou writes complexly, majestically, of land and its descendants.”
        —Claire Hong, author of Upend

“In these inquisitive, luminous poems, Grace H. Zhou conjures the past, reclaiming the figure of China Mary, who stands for the great numbers of Chinese immigrant women lost to history. With this sage guide to the Western landscape, Zhou reveals the hope and sorrow that lie in layers in the land itself. Through charting multiple migration journeys, and excavating story from artifact and silences, Zhou has drawn on her anthropological tools to create an art that shows us who we are, where we are, and how to live in the complexity of our stories.”
        —Rachel Richardson, author of Copperhead and Hundred-Year Wave

“Brimming with lush language and images at once sharp and tender, these poems spurn the mythology of ‘a lie so vast, called a nation.’ The poet chooses instead to locate the diasporic self among the undercurrents: poppy and dandelion, the voices of early Chinese laborers, the life a family makes despite the precarity of ‘stolen / freedoms’ and ‘wiretapped dreams.’ Through the work of deep attention that is the ‘poets’ prayer,’ Grace H. Zhou cultivates the language we need to better know ourselves and our relationships to land, ghosts, and one another.”
        —Jade Cho, author of In the Tongue of Ghosts

Author

Grace H. Zhou is a poet and cultural anthropologist. Her poems appear in Ninth Letter, Narrative Magazine, Longleaf Review, and elsewhere. She has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Tin House Workshops, and others. A finalist for Black Warrior Review’s 2022 poetry contest judged by Diane Seuss and nominated for Best of the Net, she received her PhD from Stanford University and is currently a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow. She serves as a reader for Tinderbox Poetry.

Artwork

Cover by Nora Kelly.

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