Light waves - by Kirsten Shu-Ying Chen (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Kirsten Shu-ying Chen's searing debut collection offers a poignant exploration of the liminal space between what is holy and what is prosaic. Formalistically rich and varied, these poems do not blink in the face of grief, but shelter there. Chen "curse[s] the wide width of the wound" and creates a world in which her poems link arms to enter the blistering present. A demonstration of the daily rituals of love, these elegies swell with humanity as death draws near. "The body knows. / The night knows and the body listens." Light waves simultaneously reminds us of what we already know and what we too often forget: there just isn't enough time, and yet, an abundance of joy is everywhere, for each of us.

-Omotara James, Song of My Softening

Review Quotes

While light waves is a book of mourning, it is also one of bafflement and wonderment, pluck and joy. Kirsten Shu-ying Chen writes about the loss of a beloved parent with great tenderness, and with the detailed eye of a jeweler or a scientist-an eye that recognizes what is precious without succumbing to preciousness. In these poems we find Chen learning from grief as she leans into it and reaches beyond it. What she learns is all the more affecting for being so hard won: "When I think of God, / I think of language / falling / short but leaping anyway."

-Mark Bibbins, 13^th Balloon

Kirsten Shu-ying Chen's poems grieve, celebrate, and pull us into their vibrant worlds with sonic precision and moving intimacy. I most admire the striking aliveness of the mother at the heart of the book. Chen portrays the mother in memoriam, the mother dying, with such sharp attention that we can't help but fall in love with the woman behind "Nancy Chen & the Sorry People" who pulls singles from her bra for the church collection basket and winks while seated in her wheelchair. Chen's light waves treats grief with an enviable transcendence made possible through otherworldly love-the love of family, yes, but also a willful love of life.

-Eugenia Leigh, Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows