AMNESIA • Print Only

Summary

After nearly forgetting her first language, Hal Y. Zhang discovered a jagged hole that could not be filled by a second. AMNESIA, her debut poetry chapbook, grasps at the echoes of her mother and sister tongues, 中文 and English. In both subject and form, these poems excavate the personal and the linguistic and map profound shifts in identity to the shape of words and radicals. Find their buried skins, their bitter unfurling, and divine the root forms of their leaves.

Details

• Selected for the 2020 Emerging Poets Chapbook Series
• Saddle-stitched, risograph cover, 28 pages, 5″ x 7.25″, FSC-certified paper
• Order print + e-book
• Order e-book only

Praise

“‘no one speaks mandarin to me unless / they are desperate.’ Hal Y. Zhang’s poems are funny and plainspoken in ways I didn’t know I needed—and then they swerve into devastating yet nourishing dreamscapes I can’t stop wandering through. For a collection called AMNESIA, it is remarkable how vivid this work is, how visceral, down to ‘gut bacteria’ and ‘consonants for broken birds to nurse.’ This chapbook demonstrates how gaps in memory are themselves wildly generative and embraces the subterranean pathways that open up in (mis)translation. Zhang never lets a reader forget that language is more than the words one recalls—it is accusative light and aphoristic teeth and ‘heart things.’”
        —Chen Chen, author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

“‘This is chinese, pictographic only for the free trial,’ asserts Hal Y. Zhang’s opening poem, setting up an unfolding of ‘radical loss.’ Just as a shadow life trails immigrants and their children through their days, the shadow language of Chinese animates many of these incisive English lines. Spare and visual, Zhang’s poems capture the longings and misunderstandings that come with migration, as well as ‘what we gain in translation.’ AMNESIA is a powerful distillation of complex experience into the fewest possible words.”
        —Adrienne Su, author of Middle Kingdom and Peach State

“With thoughtful nods to Chinese poetic history, Zhang’s poems purposefully dis-orient, highlight dis-ease. One must re-orient, like the immigrant, in order to read. For it is an immigrant’s language—more legible and richer the deeper one’s immersion in two places at once. Striking back at the mute pictograph of Pound and Fenollosa, AMNESIA is a breaking-through of character, a touching and daring medium between selves.”
        —Yanyi, author of The Year of Blue Water

“Within Zhang’s AMNESIA, a conflict between tradition and reality emerges. The conflict is often West merging with East, and by the middle of this beautiful chapbook, kanji characters melt into Latin script—tradition into present culture, familial expectation into present desire, the crafted self into the actual self. While the palette is five-thousand years of ancient history, the landscape is the internal rectification of one woman.”
        —The US Review of Books

“A bold and staccato dance with form and sound that explores an identity pulled in multiple directions.”
        —Independent Book Review

“The tension between languages and cultures is exquisitely illustrated.”
        —The Poetry Question

Author

Hal Y. Zhang is a lapsed physicist with hazy memories of once-life in China. She splits her time between the east coast of the United States and the Internet. Her science fiction chapbook Hard Mother, Spider Mother, Soft Mother was published by Radix Media, and her poetry collection Goddess Bandit of the Thousand Arms is forthcoming from Aqueduct Press.

Artwork

Cover by LK James.