To respect member's privacy and keep things awesome, most of Litsy is hidden from Google. We let humans see and share pages, but not machines. Find out more.
Debut collection of poems that weaves stories of family history, war, and migration.
Dong Li’s The Orange Tree is a collection of narrative poems that braids forgotten legends, personal sorrows, and political upheavals into a cinematic account of Chinese history as experienced by one family. Amid chaos and catastrophe, the child narrator examines a yellowed family photo to find resemblances and learns a new language, inventing compound words to conjure and connect family stories. These invented words and the calligraphy of untranslated Chinese characters appear in lists separating the book’s narrative sections. Li’s lyrical and experimental collection transcends the individual, placing generations of family members and anonymous others together in a single moment that surpasses chronological time. Weaving through stories of people with little means, between wars and celebrations, over bridges and walls, and between trees and gardens, Li’s poems offer intimate perspectives on times that resonate with our own. The result is an unflinching meditation on family history, collective trauma, and imaginative recovery.
The Orange Tree is the recipient of the inaugural Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize for 2023.
This was an interesting enough collection! I wish I had the paperback so that I could experience the formatting better! It also reminded me a lot of the Angel of history.
pick
The Orange Tree: (Phoenix Poets) | 
