Cold thief place / Esther Lin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lin, Esther, author.

Standardized Title:

Cold thief place (Compilation)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Noncitizens--United States--Poetry.

Noncitizens.

Immigrant families--United States--Poetry.

Immigrant families.

Autobiographical poetry, American.

Genre:

poetry.

Confessional poetry.

Poetry.

Physical Description:

74 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

New Gloucester, Maine : Alice James Books, [2025]

Summary:

"Cold Thief Place speaks of the experiences of an undocumented American, her parents who fled Communist China and found safety in fundamentalist Christianity, and how she tried to understand them and herself by way of confessional poems. This is a family story. It tells of a mother who fled an authoritarian government and turned that authoritarianism on to her children. Of a father who made a new life--three times on three different continents--and his sea voyage in between. Or what a daughter imagines of these events, as much as it's possible to truly know one's parents. The narrator, who is their daughter, grew up in difficult but very different circumstances, too: undocumented in the United States and was pressured into a greencard marriage in order to live a "normal life." One of the myths of America is that Americans are newly formed, defiant of authority, and free from old-world traditions. This book speaks to dark side of this myth: of the legacies that my parents wished to escape but instead carried with them: their distrust of government and their desire for an authoritarianism similar to the kind they had fled. Individually, the poems attempt to understand the emotions surrounding these impulses, from the point-of-view of their daughter, who is herself displaced as an undocumented American--that is, a person who is not permitted to be American, and without a home country to return to"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Cold thief place

The ghost wife

Hidden one

I see her best

The real thing

Out of the mouths of babes

Up the mountains down the fields

When ICE came for me

Disappearing act

Ms. L

describe your petitioner

Mr. F

describe your beneficiary

Done right

The Badlands

For my father the West begins in Africa

In Durban we encountered a problem

First snow

Azaleas

A book about dragons

Fantasy novel

Reading Madame Bovary

Attachment theory

Diagnosis

Habit

Cholera is what my grandfather did

During the war

Tell me where the past is

Listening

Wuping, 1969

Chu Ying

Winter

Illegal immigration

Notes

Acknowledgments.

Other Format:

Online version: Lin, Esther. Cold thief place

ISBN:

9781949944709

1949944700

OCLC:

1428897023