Letters Home 回家, Jennifer Wong’s remarkable and vivid third collection of poems, unravels the complexities of being between nations, languages and cultures. Travelling across multiple borders of history and place, these poems examine what it means to be returning home, and whether it is a return to a location, a country or to a shared dream or language.
Jennifer Wong has an instinct for intricate, multifaceted poems which, like love-letters from the past to the present, draw the reader into a tender confidence, at once revealing and particular. From the story of an ice-lantern, a derelict village school in Guizhou to the graffiti and tear gas in Hong Kong’s streets, these poems reveal postcards of memories etched into skin, the fragments of different cultural, historical and linguistic worlds. In writing their way home, these poems navigate the expectations and beliefs which shape, confine, trouble, and liberate us.
Letters Home by Jennifer Wong
Jennifer Wong was born and grew up in Hong Kong, and is the author of two poetry collections including Goldfish (Chameleon Press 2013). She studied English at Oxford and received an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. She is the recipient of the Hong Kong Young Artist Award (Literary Arts) and earned a PhD on the idea of place and identity in Asian diaspora poetry from Oxford Brookes University. Her work, including poems, reviews and translations, have appeared in various journals including The Rialto, Poetry London, Poetry Review, And Other Poems, Oxford Poetry, Stand, North, Wildness, Cha, Wasafiri, Voice & Verse, Warwick Review and others. Her works have won the runner-up prize at the Bi’an Writers Awards and have been long-listed in pamphlet competitions and National Poetry Competition.