Dispatches Blog
Fall Books
"A profound meditation on memory’s ability to conjure the ineffable. Chengru He guides us through the ghost-layers of history—a history constellated by brutality and longing—and does so with extraordinary tenderness."
— Selah Saterstrom, author of Ideal Suggestions and Slab
Chengru He’s I Would Vanish Into Its Stronger Existence uncovers in verse, prose, images, and found documents the story of her mother’s experience as a zhiqing, or “sent down youth” during Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China. This story, and the journey mother and daughter take to revisit the rubber plantation in Yunnan where she was sent, provides a shifting backdrop to the author’s own journey as a Chinese student in America, writing in English. How are we shaped by exile, and displacement, how does language and landscape confine us, or free us? These are the questions posed by Chengru He in a unique idiom of her own invention. A true hybrid of language and sensibility, moving from Shanghai to Tuscaloosa, through generations and memory, this collection marks the debut of an original international voice.
“Work hard. Accomplish nothing,” is one of the instructions Tony Wallin-Sato receives in a brief residency at a Zen temple. With poignant detail and relentless compassion, Wallin-Sato devotes himself to the fulfillment of that koan in this book-length sequence of poems. Tony Wallin-Sato is indeed one of the young contemporary poets for whom Whitman has stopped somewhere and happily waited. —Bill Mohr, author of Holdouts: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992
What imprisons us, and what makes us free is a theme that runs like a wild river through the poems and prose of this collection. “Okaerinasai,” which roughly translates as “welcome back home,” weaves together Wallin-Sato’s adventures as a young Japanese-American in California struggling with addiction, to his redemptive adult work as a “re-entry” advocate for the formerly incarcerated. A series of riveting accounts of “gate pickups” when the author and his network greet former prisoners in their first hours of freedom, form a cinematic backdrop to meditations on Dogen’s Zen teachings and lyric reflections on the wilderness of California’s North Coast. Echos of Basho, and Bukowski sound through the work, with a powerful breadth of language that remains at its heart a fierce reparation for all that is false and broken.