Middle Kingdom
Adrienne Su
“Here is a fresh and profound voice heralding in new cultural bridges in poetry.”
—Va Quart
"Middle Kingdom is
the slippery, hard-to-read territory between languages, cultures, identities—a fluid,
confusing boundary zone which is both enriching and embattled. Suburban, Asian-American,
at home and exiled in places and tongues, Su negotiates the mercurial new world of
cultural commingling in witty, formally assured poems—often in elegantly accomplished
forms which themselves add to the layering of cultural reference. This volume is an
auspicious, engaging debut, and its pleasures are especially evident in a signature Su
poem, ‘In Mexico City’, which delights in a collision of tongues, in the human
possibilities conjoined vocabularies reveal."
—Mark Doty
"Adrienne Su is so unusual, such a good poet, and has so much
to say, that she’s addictive: once you start reading her poems you want to go on
forever in the Middle Kingdom. Also, she is such a good rhymer that you don’t know
she’s rhyming: you find out, as you read along, that you have been rhymed deeply. She
is very good."
—Alan Dugan
"Is it authentic? Beneath this question
rests a garden in all its tended beauty. This is the plot of Adrienne Su, who raises a
voice of calm and subtle strength in her evocation of a new land, stretching from China to
suburban Virginia, across class and race divides, defining these States, homing in on the
poem. Here there is no doubt: Ms Su is the real thing, an authentic
poet who lifts the craft into orbit, gives a readout that inexorably relaxes us as humans
into being. That’s the poem’s home, the Middle Kingdom, where Adrienne Su lives,
writes, and tends the garden."
—Bob Holman
about the author
Born in Atlanta in 1967, Adrienne Su studied at Harvard and the University of Virginia, and has had residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her poems appear in The New American Poets, Poetry Daily, Poetry 30, Asian-American Poetry: The Next Generation, and other anthologies. In 2003, she was the resident poet at The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. She received a 2007 NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry. She lives in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she is an assistant professor and poet-in-residence at Dickinson College. She received a 2007 NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry.
Author photo by Joanna Eldredge Morrissey
