Motherlands: Poems

(Hardback)

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Winner of the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, this engrossing debut interrogates history, identity, and the power of poetry to elucidate both.

Motherlands cultural and linguistic tensions in both historical and modern settings. He cites Chinese laborers toiling in American factoriesan echo of the brutalities endured by those who constructed the Transatlantic Railroadand 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 artists dutyhis dutyas 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 universalLi 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 poetrys capacity to ground us, teach us, and change us.

Reviews

Praise for Human Resources"Ryann Stevenson's debut collection Human Resources captures the eerie, 'Black Mirror' feeling that we've already crossed some A.I. event horizon . . . Stevenson has a deadpan human to counteract the surreality: 'Last night was a first: I screamed out loud / when trying to scream in a dream.' . . . We get the dialogue backward, as in Martin Amis's novel 'Time's Arrow, ' in which a Nazi lives his life again from death to birth. Both a nightmare and a fantasy, this undoing. 'I want to go back and change my answer, ' Stevenson writes--too late for that! Or, to paraphrase Kafka: Plenty of hope, but not for us."--Elisa Gabbert, New York Times"In Human Resources, the speaker is often isolated, even as she's building technology that's supposed to help connect people. Much of this isolation, the poet conveys, came from [Stevenson] being a woman in a male-dominated industry . . . By thinking about connecting with an unknown being on the other side of a screen or speaker, Stevenson addresses a kind of detachment that is a result of modern technology. And yet, by thinking of the woman's role in a male-dominated space, she joins a sisterhood of poets who bravely capture the feeling of female isolation."--NPR's Morning Edition"Here is the past without robot screens, and here is the future that we cannot but try to anticipate through them. It is memorable then, while anticipating, that the person who designs AI throughout Human Resources does not always look at her own screens but, more often, through other windows, with the 'neighbor's TV / flashing silently, / as if he were still awake.'"--Ploughshares"The lyric explorations in Stevenson's beautifully discriminating book--of self and soul, femininity and society, the peculiarities and intricacies of 'design' within nature and culture--are stunned, fine-minded testimonies. In a time of cold virtual ecosystems and lightweight psychological theories and remedies, Human Resources speaks for mystery and vulnerability."--Sandra Lim"The controlled anxiety of the present is captured brilliantly by this wary, lucid book. We live in an era when our humanness is worn down--by virtual beings, bots, synced devices, battery life, data, radiation, sulfates, and lead--so we must practice mindfulness to keep from losing track of who we are. This brave, tough book suggests that flowering maples, yoga, orcas, and the hands of our mothers might help us preserve our innocence. Human Resources is a lyric transcript of what it is to be a citizen at a punishing time."--Henri Cole

Author Bio

Weijia Panis the author ofMotherlands, selected by Louise Glck for the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. A poet and translator from Shanghai, China, his poems have appeared inAGNI,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 thePaul Verlaine Prize in Poetry.