Read more
"Winner of the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, this engrossing debut interrogates history, identity, and the power of poetry to elucidate both"--
About the author
Weijia Pan is the author of
Motherlands, selected by Louise Glück for the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. A poet and translator from Shanghai, China, his poems have appeared in
AGNI,
Boulevard,
Copper Nickel,
Georgia Review,
New Ohio Review,
Ninth Letter,
Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He is a third-year MFA at the University of Houston, where he is a winner of the Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry.
Summary
Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, this engrossing debut interrogates history, identity, and the power of poetry to elucidate both.
Motherlands opens with a child drawn early to poetry. “In summer I write. Two lines at a time, two vying souls / running up the wall.” The collection follows this speaker-poet through a childhood in post-Maoist China and an eventual move to the United States, laying bare cultural and linguistic tensions in both historical and modern settings. He cites Chinese laborers toiling in American factories—an echo of the brutalities endured by those who constructed the Transatlantic Railroad—and speaks to anxieties around belonging, assimilation, and identity. “If I forget one character a day,” he writes. “I will have forgotten Chinese / by the end of 2042.”
In these attentive, imaginative poems, Weijia Pan questions the artist’s duty—his duty—as a chronicler of truth, especially through issues of displacement and global injustice. What can the poet do but observe? And yet, in unpacking ancestral traumas connected to Maoist China and modern-day bigotry exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, he still finds himself turning to art as a way to understand both the self and the world at large. Through elegant juxtapositions, Pan crafts an emotional world that is at once regional and universal—Li Bai and Du Fu sit alongside Glenn Gould and Sviatoslav Richter, pepper used to bless new roads is repurposed in the mace used against protesters, two languages compete on a single tongue. Lyrical and visionary, this collection embodies poetry’s capacity to ground us, teach us, and change us.
Foreword
- National media campaign, including TV, radio, and online interviews
- National print campaign, including reviews, features, and original essays
- Author events in Austin, New York and Boston
- Digital galley campaign; digital galley available for download on Edelweiss
- Advertising campaign targeting top literary and poetry sites, including the Academy of American Poetry
- Newsletter promotion via the publisher to readers, booksellers, librarians, and academic lists of more than 70K contacts
- Comprehensive social media campaign
- Academic outreach for course adoption
