回 / Return

Emily Lee Luan’s distinctive debut does, again and again, what the title both describes and commands: 回 / Return. It returns to places, arranging words like blueprints so that the lines “A child // in yellow / in the courtyard” are positioned on the edge of a courtyard, with words serving as walls. It returns to the base emotions of childhood, and the anxieties and remedies that encircle them, like in “Anger Diaries”:

My mother had my ears pierced at age nine to cure me of my
   temper.
Now the old ache greens in my chest.
I have been cutting my hair to be kinder.

As a child, the speaker had fought a boy who “called [her] Asian,” “kicked and kicked him until his face turned young and sad.” The strength of the response is commensurate with “an anger rooted in sadness.” The poem “My Sadness Was Not Like a Season” depicts the continuing relationship between the two feelings into adulthood: “It did not turn. It raced red and red and red.” The sadness that cannot turn is a return to youth—the speaker recalls screaming as a child, lacking a way to express “an anger so bright it once made my father put his fist through a wall.”

The book returns, too, to ancient poetic form. In the style of palindromic poems built by Chinese characters, much of 回 / Return is dazzlingly multidirectional, challenging the eye to travel across areas of text in “reversible poems” that can be read down the page, first to last line, as well as up, last to first, each reading offering new meanings. Even poems not marked as “reversible” contain this possibility, exemplified by the bewitching “Ruthless”:

無心，“without heart”;
無情，“without feeling”;
heartless, ruthless, pitiless.

Is the vacant heart so ruthless?

The ancient pictogram for 無 shows a person
with something dangling in each hand. Nothingness
the image of yourself with what you once had,

what you could have. And the figure is dancing,
as if to say nothingness is a feeling, maybe even
a happiness—dancing with what is gone from you.