Return Flight

(Paperback)

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Selected by Jos Charles as the winner of the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Return Flightis a lush reckoning: with inheritance, with body, with trauma, with desireand with the many tendons in between.

When Return Flight asks what name / do you crown yourself, Huang answers with many. Textured with mountainsa folkloric goddess-prison, Yushan, mother, men, selfand peppered with shapeshifting creatures, spirits, and gods, the landscape of Jennifer Huangs poems is at once mystical and fleshy, a myth a mess of myself. Sensuously, Huang depicts each of these not as things to claim but as topographies to behold and hold.

Here, too, is another kind of mythology. Set to the music of beating hearts / through objects passed down, the poems travel through generationsamong Taiwan, China, and Americacataloging familial wounds and beloved stories. A grandfathers smile shining through rain, baby bok choy in a childs bowl, a slap felt decades laterthe result is a map of a present-day life, reflected through the past.

Return Flight is a thrumming debut that teaches us how history harrows and heals, often with the same hand; how touch can mean purple and blue as much as it means intimacy; and how one might find a path toward joy not by leaving the past in the past, but by [keeping a] hand on these memories, / to feel them to their ends.

Reviews

Praise for Return Flight

[An] avid, observant debut . . . The poems here chart the path from past to present wherever it leads, coolly and curiously.New York Times Book Review, Newly Published

I love the complicated emotional range Huang conveys . . . Deceptively delicate.Ron Charles, Washington Posts Book Club newsletter

"Huang joyfully and deftly weaves together mythology, objects, landscapes, food, violence and intimacy across time and space into an immersive collection that hits every pleasure center and deeply felt emotional beat."Seattle Times

An emerging, brilliant poet . . . Huangs poems ring true for readers expressly because of their willingness to share the often complicated, difficult-to-pin-down yearning of the outsider, and as Huangs speakers journey back through difficult terrain, we are often returned to a place of compassion and openness for where we might land next.Lavender Magazine

Return Flight is both grave and beautiful, often simultaneously, a clear window into Jennifer Huangs lifeInternational Examiner

There is such a thing as a vulnerability, not of the personal, but of the unsaid: a strength in testifying to contradiction, overflowing occurrence, like saying something that surprises even yourself or a fleeing that returns.Return Flightis an attentive but effulgent but joyously aching book. Its lines dig inward and cling even as they unfold outward in excess and surprise.What pain is the desire for painone poem asks.Many visitors lately, another begins,I wake to an ache in my sternum. Huangs lines can move like that, with, sonically, crystalline compactness, while directing the reader with cinematic clarity of scene and the delights of recontextualization.I wanted this poem to be about dropping textbooks on my arm to get out of practicing violinis an actualhow carefully it discloses!opening line. And while there is much to mourn, andReturn Flightdoes mourn, it never gives into despair, the unsaid of parting, things never touchingbut offers in its place a poetics of gentle, real, expansive touching. It comes back around and leads us out: like awindow you turn to and notice outside two papayas touching. Return Flightis a book that aligns itself with pleasure. Burrow inside.Jos Charles

Jennifer Huangs compelling poems arise from the mutable realm between speaking and flying, touching and breaking, absence and forgiveness, numbness and desire, everywhere and nowhere, the home of the bodyand home. Here, the poem abides even through gradations of silencethe bone in the throat, the tongue both captive and captivated, and love, too, abides, despite striations and separations, even dissolving the veil between the living and the dead. Huang writes, what I know is what I imagine, and it is imagination, made manifest in poems that map a blooming selfhood, that fuels the concentric energy of Return Flight.Diane Seuss

Jennifer HuangsReturn Flightfeels like a conversation and journey at once. Itis a charismatic debut collection, one of whose many feats is its meditation on lineage. The poet asks:How does pain suture and puncture a family through generations What language gives what body to that pain Whose languages and forms have I inheritedWhose literary lineages am I writing inDeeply introspective, Huang also contemplates the distance between me and I, the distance between themselves and their body, and how love can turn the self into a stranger as well as an opening for others. I marvel at theintimacy and wonder with which Huang treats and transforms their figuresmany of whom are shape-shifting, mythical, or part-humanto render their themes into rich imagery. At the end of this conversation, this journey, I also emerge a different animal, vigilant and curious about my own body and its place in this strange, cruel, and miraculous world.Emily Jungmin Yoon

How delighted I am by these poems that praise the holy scent of ripe mud and the joyful stench of chou doufu. How moved I am by this poet who understands thatbeauty can stink, desire can suffocate as much as illuminate, and becoming is an endless looking back while dreaming into. And family is never simple, always ample withhistory, lilies, seas, such fissure alongside tenderness. Jennifer Huang is more than an undeniably talented poetthey are an uncompromising truth-teller.Chen Chen

Poems about childhood and selfhood, pleasure and pain, that try on different forms Elisa Gabbert, Medium

Author Bio

Jennifer Huang was born in Maryland to Taiwanese immigrants and has since called many places her home. Their poems have appeared in POETRY, The Rumpus, and Narrative Magazine, among other places; and they have been received recognition from the Academy of American Poets, Brooklyn Poets, North American Taiwan Studies Association, and more. In 2020, Jennifer earned their MFA in poetry at the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers' Program. They live in Ypsilanti, Michigan.