# Motherlands: Poems - Hardcover

by **Weijia Pan** (Author)

**Chosen by Louise Gl?ck for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, this engrossing debut interrogates history, identity, and the power of poetry to elucidate both.**

_Motherlands_ opens with a child drawn early to poetry. "In summer I write. Two lines at a time, two vying souls / running up the wall." The collection follows this speaker-poet through a childhood in post-Maoist China and an eventual move to the United States, laying bare cultural and linguistic tensions in both historical and modern settings. He cites Chinese laborers toiling in American factories--an echo of the brutalities endured by those who constructed the Transatlantic Railroad--and 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 artist's duty--his duty--as 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 universal--Li 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 poetry's capacity to ground us, teach us, and change us.

### Author Biography

**Weijia Pan** is the author of _Motherlands_, selected by Louise Glück for the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. A poet and translator from Shanghai, China, his poems have appeared in _AGNI_, _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 the Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry.

**Number of Pages:** 96

**Dimensions:** 0.7 x 8.6 x 5.9 IN

**Publication Date:** September 17, 2024

## Details

- **Price:** 22.0 USD
- **Vendor:** Books by splitShops
- **Type:** Books
- **Tags:** Books by splitShops, Shopify Collective

## Variants

| Variant | Price | Available |
|---------|-------|-----------|
| Default Title | 22.00 USD | In stock |

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- Motherlands: Poems - Hardcover

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