Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive: Poems (Juniper Prize for Poetry) - Softcover

Jennifer Tseng (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1625348088 ISBN 13: 9781625348081

Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

Synopsis

Crafted with lines from her late father’s letters, Jennifer Tseng’s Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive is a portrait of an immigrant, a rootless person whose unspoken loss―that of his native geography, family, traditions, language―underlies every word. Though her father’s first language was Mandarin, for more than twenty years he wrote these letters in English,so that she could understand them. Someare riddled with errors, some nearly unintelligible. Lines from his letters appear as titles and are scattered throughout the poems, blending voices of father and daughter. This collection enacts what it means to lose someone and commune with them simultaneously―the paradox of grief and all it gives us.

About this title

About the Author

Jennifer Tseng is an assistant professor of literature and creative writing at UC Santa Cruz. She is the author of two previous full-length poetry collections: The Man With My Face and Red Flower, White Flower. Her flash fiction collection, The Passion of Woo & Isolde, was a Firecracker Award finalist and winner of an Eric Hoffer Book Award; and her novel, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness, was shortlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the New England Book Award.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1625348088
• ISBN 13: 9781625348081
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80