Border Vista

The poems in Anni Liu’s Border Vista fit together like a novel in verse as they follow the speaker from childhood through their twenties, recalling their parents’ separation, time spent with grandparents, and a move from Xī'ān (or 西安, which is both the speaker’s birth city and namesake) to “Ohio and lead skies.”

One of the most successful aspects of Border Vista is the way we are (re)located in memory between languages. In “Ars Poetica in a Dream Language,” virgules fragment questions surrounding a tangled identity:

[…] / fluency: I can’t / unhear my Chinese
memories in English / does that make them / American
memories / the word ravel / means the same thing
as its opposite / to entangle or disentangle / render
incoherent or make plain / […]

Later, the collection pivots toward using Chinese, both in Pinyin romanization and in Chinese characters. In “Xī'ān Nocturne with Jasmine and Pears,” meaning hinges entirely on the slippery nuances between homophones:

she reminds me that the word for pear
sounds the same as the word for leave
          梨 (lí) and 离 (lí)
you’re telling me I paid too great a price
to leave, she says

inflected differently, 莉 (lì) is jasmine
   my mother’s namesake

While these poems brilliantly excavate a cognitive dissonance the speaker experiences as a “double-edged feeling,” there are some aspects of the narrative (like why the father must leave and is imprisoned) that remain mysterious. I’m not sure if this is meant to reflect the limited understanding of the child speaker or if the story could be developed, deepened. 

Many of the poems in this collection occupy a liminal space between waking and dreaming, and in the final poem, “Autoscopy” (meaning out of body experience), the speaker is awoken by rain, “letting me approach the iron gate // where memory waits.”