Return Flight

**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 Huang's 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 grandfather's smile shining through rain, baby bok choy in a child's 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."**

Dettagli