Soil Called a Country
(By Grace H. Zhou)
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| Author | Grace H. Zhou |
ABOUT THE BOOK
Weaving botanical epistles with dreamscapes, road trips, and hauntings, Soil Called a Country reimagines the American West through personal, familial, and historical experiences of the Chinese diaspora. In her debut chapbook selected for the 2023 Emerging Poets Series, poet and anthropologist Grace H. Zhou probes what it means to make a home as an immigrant in a settler colonial nation. Through a speculative poetics of repair, she asks: How to tread softly, dream otherwise, create space for our elsewheres?
PRAISE
“These formally varied poems traverse diverse landscapes, cross continents and oceans that are haunted by history’s forgotten ghosts. ‘We folded the past like a secret / inheritance,’ Zhou writes in the opening poem, before reanimating this hidden past. Soil Called a Country is a stirring excavation of loss and desire, inherited traumas and dreams. It is also a reclamation of home and humanity for some of the unnamed, voiceless spirits that litter our history—the Chinese immigrants who struggled to make a life in a harsh new land, including countless women nicknamed China Mary and the victims of the LA Chinatown massacre of 1871. An anthropologist as well as a poet, Zhou understands better than most the importance of this unearthing. In the closing poem, she writes, ‘To reimagine is to remember. / To feed is to keep alive.’ Soil Called a Country remembers those whom the dominant culture would forget and, in doing so, keeps their dreams alive.”
—Jenni Qi, author of Focal Point
“Here is a poet skilled and perceptive in language as a forager, invoking what is timeless, ancient, and immediate: the life cycles of plants and the preservation of knowledge and care between generations and relations. Through a wide display (and reclamation) of poetic forms, violent histories, and the losses marked by racially-targeted erasure and fracture, Zhou provides remedy. Where there is starvation, there is satiation. Where there is archived language defining immigrants solely for their labor and utility, there is gesture to holistic remembrance, ‘un-bending their backs.’ This is the travel narrative—or rather, a rumination that crosses geographies and time—I’ve been waiting for. Zhou writes complexly, majestically, of land and its descendants.”
—Claire Hong, author of Upend”
