National Poetry Month: Willie Lin

About Blog Post Apr 24, 2024 by SCLSNJ Staff

National Poetry Month: Willie Lin Created by Bob Helmbrecht, collection development librarian Our National Poetry Month poet for today is Willie Lin. Lin’s debut full-length poetry collection, "Conversation Among Stones," was published in November by BOA Editions as part of its New Poets of America series. From the publisher's description: "Through fields of wild grass, restless seascapes, and cities tinged with sand, Willie Lin's debut collection of poetry questions what can remain and what must be pared away in our search for truth. 'Conversation Among Stones' speaks both to the inanimate—misremembered histories, photographs, the dead—and to the voices in our daily lives that reverberate with disagreement and confusion." The collection has received some excellent reviews. Poet Jennifer Chang said of the collection: "The quiet of Willie Lin's poems is deceptive, masking a profound doubt that she wields like a gleaming knife. The doubt of memory, the doubt of love and knowledge, the doubt of the self, and above all, the doubt of language. Such doubt inscribes her lines with a bewitching ferocity, as this ambitious poet writes into and against the elusive truths of experience, filling the mouth with 'salt, a stand of trees, ink' and 'ordinary sorrow.' Most remarkable about ‘Conversation Among Stones,’ though, is how Lin brings us closer both to language's inscrutability and to the devastations that '[meet] silence with silence.'" Check out "Conversation Among Stones" by Willie Lin today!

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National Poetry Month: Willie Lin