Wendy Chen

Have you ever noticed this? You land at Rhode Island T.F. Green International Airport, check your Uber fare, and decide to wait a moment before booking. A few minutes later, you check again – and the price has changed. Same trip. Same destination. Almost the same time. Yet a different quote.

“I am calling up the dead—the dead of my family,” writes Wendy Chen in her debut poetry collection, Unearthings. “I pull them out of the earth by their hair, by the fistful.” In crystalline verse, Chen unearths her own family history as well as broader cultural histories of exile, immigration, and the complexities of identity. The resulting collection is haunted—by ancestors, ghosts, and stories long ignored or forgotten.

“The feelings I make into poems / are like the magpie at night, / circling three times, unable to settle,” writes Li Qingzhao in one of her surviving fragments. Though she is considered the greatest woman poet in Chinese history and has been hailed for her intense Dickinsonian clarity and vision, Li Qingzhao remains relatively unknown in the West. When I first heard Li Qingzhao’s poetry recited to me by a family member, I was immediately arrested by the power of her imagery.