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• Middle Kingdom Alice James Books (Farmington, ME), 1997
• Sanctuary Manic D Press (San Francisco, CA), 2006
• Having None of It Manic D Press (San Francisco, CA), 2009
• Living Quarters Manic D Press (San Francisco, CA), 2015
• Peach State University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 2021
• Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet: Essays and Reviews Paul Dry Books (Philadelphia, PA), 2024

1. Hot, sour, salty, sweet : essays and reviews LCCN 2024939326 Type of material Book Personal name Su, Adrienne, 1967- author. Main title Hot, sour, salty, sweet : essays and reviews / Adrienne Su. Edition First edition. Published/Produced Philadelphia : Paul Dry Books, Inc, 2024. Projected pub date 2408 Description pages cm ISBN 9781589881921 (trade paperback) (ebook) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. Peach State LCCN 2022278857 Type of material Book Personal name Su, Adrienne, 1967- author. Main title Peach State / Adrienne Su. Published/Produced Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania : University of Pittsburgh Press, [2021] Description 101 pages ; 23 cm. ISBN 9780822966562 (paperback ; acid-free paper) 0822966565 (paperback ; acid-free paper) CALL NUMBER PS3569.U13 P43 2021 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 3. Living quarters LCCN 2014044711 Type of material Book Personal name Su, Adrienne, 1967- Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title Living quarters / Adrienne Su. Published/Produced San Francisco, CA : Manic D Press, [2015] Projected pub date 1502 Description pages ; cm ISBN 9781933149899 (trade pbk. original : alk. paper) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 4. Having none of it LCCN 2008050002 Type of material Book Personal name Su, Adrienne, 1967- Main title Having none of it / Adrienne Su. Published/Created San Francisco : Manic D Press, c2009. Description 94 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 9781933149271 (trade pbk.) 1933149272 (trade pbk.) CALL NUMBER PS3569.U13 H38 2009 FT MEADE Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 5. Sanctuary LCCN 2006006476 Type of material Book Personal name Su, Adrienne, 1967- Main title Sanctuary / Adrienne Su. Published/Created San Francisco : Manic D Press, c2006. Description 62 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 193314906X (trade pbk. original : alk. paper) 9781933149066 (trade pbk. original : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER PS3569.U13 S36 2006 FT MEADE Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 6. Middle Kingdom : poems LCCN 96040204 Type of material Book Personal name Su, Adrienne, 1967- Main title Middle Kingdom : poems / by Adrienne Su. Published/Created Farmington, Me. : Alice James Books, c1997. Description 70 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 1882295153 (alk. paper) CALL NUMBER PS3569.U13 M53 1997 FT MEADE Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Adrienne Su website - https://adriennesu.ink

  Adrienne Su is the author of five books of poems, Peach State, Living Quarters, Having None of It, Sanctuary, and Middle Kingdom. Her poems have been featured on websites such as Poetry Daily and Poem-a-Day and could turn up on your mobile device if you use the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry app. They also appear in anthologies such as The Hungry Ear; The New American Poets; Border Lines: Poems of Migration; Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation; Best American Poetry (2000, 2013, 2016, 2018, 2021); and The Norton Introduction to Literature. Su's awards include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Money for Women/Barbara Deming Foundation grant, and residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, The Frost Place, The Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She studied at Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges and the University of Virginia. Since 2000, she has taught creative writing at Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she is Poet-in-Residence.
  ​
  Su is also a dedicated home cook and CSA subscriber in the central Pennsylvania region. Food is a frequent topic of her poems and essays. At Dickinson she teaches introductory workshops in poetry and fiction, advanced workshops in poetry, and a creative nonfiction course on writing about food. Her first prose book, Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet, on poetry and food, will be published by Paul Dry Books in August 2024.

• Dickinson College website - https://www.dickinson.edu/site/custom_scripts/dc_faculty_profile_index.php?fac=sua

  Adrienne Su
  CONTACT INFORMATION
  sua@dickinson.edu

  East College Room 309
  717-245-1346
  http://adriennesu.ink

  BIO
  Adrienne Su teaches advanced poetry writing, introductory poetry and fiction, and a creative nonfiction course focused on food. She is the author of five books of poems, most recently 'Peach State' (Pitt, 2021), which was named one of 2022's Books All Georgians Should Read and a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. Among her awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Fund, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poems have appeared in many venues, including 'American Life in Poetry,' Poetry Out Loud, Elizabeth Alexander's 'The Trayvon Generation,' and five volumes of 'Best American Poetry.' Recent prose pieces include a remembrance of poet Lucie Brock-Broido in 'The Hopkins Review,' an examination of portrayals of Asia in children's books in 'New Ohio Review,' an op-ed on the Atlanta spa shootings in 'The Atlanta Journal-Constitution,' and a meditation on Chinese restaurants in the forthcoming anthology 'Ethical Eating: Conflicts, Conversations, Commitments.'

  EDUCATION
  B.A., Harvard and Radcliffe College, 1989
  M.F.A., University of Virginia, 1993

• Smith College website - https://www.smith.edu/people/adrienne-su

  Born and raised in Atlanta, Adrienne Su studied at Harvard and the University of Virginia. Her debut collection Middle Kingdom (1997) draws from her experiences as a Chinese-American woman, and has been heralded for its ability to negotiate the “slippery, hard-to-read territory between languages, cultures, identities” by Mark Doty.

  A poet who, in her own words, makes “the mundane into the stuff of poetry, rather than trying to reach for something ethereal when writing”, she has been praised by Bob Holman for her ability to “[evoke] a new land, stretching from China to suburban Virginia, across class and race divides.”

  The recipient of a Pushcart Prize and the first Ralph Samuel Poetry Fellow at Dartmouth College, she has held 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.

• Poetry Foundation website - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/adrienne-su

  Adrienne Su
  b. 1967
  Image of Adrienne Su
  Guy Freeman
  Raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Su earned a BA from Radcliffe College of Harvard University and an MFA from the University of Virginia. She is the author of the poetry collections Peach State (2021), Living Quarters (2015), Having None of It (2009), Sanctuary (2006), and Middle Kingdom (1997). Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and residencies at the Fine Arts Works Center and The Frost Place. In 2019, Su was awarded a grant from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.

  Commenting on her work for the National Endowment for the Arts website, she said that in terms of subject matter, she prefers “the daily to the exotic.” In Having None of It, this preference is evident in the focus on balancing motherhood and professional work.

  Su’s poems have appeared in the anthologies Asian-American Poetry: The Next Generation (2004), The New American Poets (2000), and The Pushcart Prize XXIV (2000).

  She teaches at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

• SOUTHERN LITERARY REVIEW - https://southernlitreview.com/authors/john-wall-barger-interviews-poet-adrienne-su.htm

  You are here: Home / Author Profiles & Interviews / John Wall Barger interviews poet Adrienne Su
  JOHN WALL BARGER INTERVIEWS POET ADRIENNE SU
  AUGUST 16, 2023 BY JOHN BARGER LEAVE A COMMENT
  Raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Adrienne Su earned a BA from Radcliffe College of Harvard University and an MFA from the University of Virginia. She’s the author of the poetry collections Peach State (2021) (Finalist for 2022 Patterson Poetry Prize), Living Quarters (2015), Having None of It (2009), Sanctuary (2006), and Middle Kingdom (1997). Her poems appear in many anthologies, including five volumes of The Best American Poetry. Among her awards are an NEA fellowship and residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, and The Frost Place. An Atlanta native, she now lives in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she is professor of creative writing at Dickinson College. Her first collection of essays, Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet, is forthcoming from Paul Dry Books in 2024.

  An Adrienne Su poem, to me, is both warm and haunting. Mark Doty commented on her ability to articulate the “slippery, hard-to-read territory between languages, cultures, identities.” Su has said, regarding the subject matter of her work, that she prefers “the daily to the exotic.” Yet—with lines taut as cello strings, and restless experiments in form—her poems always seem to probe below “the daily”; her latest book, Peach State, focused on cooking, invites us to see maple syrup (“It was not my first encounter / with paring down to an essence”) and yoghurt (“What horrors did the worker who filled this container survive?”) in novel ways. Su’s voice disarms us, leaving us vulnerable to moments that leave us breathless: “Everywhere I go I meet anxious women / with money and beautiful faces, and men / with ashes on their brows. I’m lonely as hell.”

  We conversed over Zoom in June 2023, me from my living room in Vermont, and her in her living room in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Our conversation ranged from White Rabbit candies to the guilt of abundance, Chinese restaurants, how to answer the impossible question “Where are you from?” and the “chow mein years” of Atlanta.

  JWB: Can you talk about how cooking came about as a topic of your book, Peach State?

  Adrienne Su

  AS: It’s been a huge interest for me my whole adult life. It crept up. I always thought of writing about food as something that I do in prose, or that I teach in a creative nonfiction class. I didn’t think of myself as a food poet. But it started to make its way into the poems. It happened organically, no pun intended. And during the time that my father was dying and I was going to Atlanta all the time, my daughters, my mother, and I spent much of our time in Chinese restaurants, often with extended family, many of whom grew up in China. Chinese restaurants are an extension of the home, I think, for Chinese American families. So the significance of food for me was self-evident. It was a way of writing about family and migration, memory, loss. There’s a comma between memory and loss, but I’m also thinking about memory loss because my father had dementia. There’s this end-of-life stage where people may end up in nursing homes eating what is served there, which means the end of Chinese food for my elders. On the other hand, my parents both arrived in Georgia as very young people, so Southern food is not alien to them.

  JWB: In Peach State you seem to position yourself as being between Chinese culture and white folks born in the States: folks like me, I guess. [laughs] I love how, with such a humble voice, you embrace the misunderstandings—which are funny, kind of tragic, and deep—implicit in that between place.

  AS: My point of reference, thinking about your question, is my brother. We grew up in the same household. And I’d say that we were both not taught to speak the language. There wasn’t a whole lot of access to Chinese food, the way it’s available now in Atlanta. So, for me, Chinese food and culture was something I actively explored. I went to college and took Chinese, whereas my brother went to college and took German. And I got really into cooking. My brother’s not really into cooking. It’s important to me to know how to order these Chinese meals. In these big family dinners, kids are usually passive: parents order everything, elders order everything. Because everybody eats everything. It’s not like individual people order their own dish. So you wait. All these things arrive; you take a little of each one. If you don’t like something, you skip it.

  JWB: There’s a “Lazy Susan” poem in your book.

  AS: Exactly. So I went out and sought these things, because I felt that the Chinese restaurants might be doomed. I didn’t realize that Atlanta was going to change so much. Turns out they’re not doomed. My fear was that the elders were all going to be gone. And these things, these foods, knowledge of these foods, was going to be lost, at least in the family. I think I also just wanted to eat the food. So once I moved away I thought, “Well, what is that specific food? I have no idea what it was called. How did we get it?” [laughs] I started reading cookbooks and going to Asian supermarkets, investigating. My brother and I laugh about this, because I now live in a place where those ingredients are still a little bit inconvenient to get. He lives in the Boston area, with access to it all. And he doesn’t really care to go after it. So I could have been like my brother. There’s something in me that sought out this Chinese stuff. And I think it was maybe the poet in me that feared death. The death of the elders who had the knowledge.

  JWB: You frequently mention the forebears, the ancestors.

  AS: Right. I never got to meet one of my grandmothers. There was no US-China relationship for thirty years. We weren’t able to travel back and forth.

  JWB: Your poem “Ancestors” refers to your excitement about Chinese restaurants: “It means the journey / isn’t over. Someone, though outside my family, // whose mother and father still eat from the soil / in which most of my ancestors dwell // (themselves become fruit and flowers), is trying this place, which feels like nowhere, // which is how the creation myth always begins, / with emptiness waiting to be broken.”

  AS: I don’t know if it’s clear from the poem, but I’ve never even been to that restaurant. I could tell from the menu that the food was going to be exactly the same as the food at other places. I had no interest in eating the food. I just wanted to affirm the hope of somebody starting their American dream. So maybe the doubleness of Peach State is that the Atlanta that’s dying is the one I grew up in. In which being Asian was weird, and you couldn’t get a lot of the foods that are super available now. There’s a part of me that says, “Oh, let that Atlanta die.” [laughs] But that was my life. So I miss it.

  John Wall Barger

  JWB: In your book there is, as you say, this doubleness to peaches. First, Georgia—where you grew up—is the Peach State. And peaches also lead to questions of difference between you and your ancestors. This is from “My Life in Peaches”: “Their lives were labor, they kept this from the kids, // who grew up to confuse work with pleasure, / to become typical immigrants’ children, / taller than their parents and unaware of hunger / except when asked the odd, perplexing question.”

  AS: When people asked my parents—who were immigrants—“Where are you from?” they had an answer because they did come from somewhere. [laughs] When people asked us kids “Where are you from,” the kids were perplexed. “From here. Why are you asking?” This has become a cliché of immigrant writing, so it’s hard to deal with in a poem. What can I do that neither dismisses it nor repeats something that’s been done too much? It’s a reminder that you look foreign. You forget that when you’re just living your daily life, especially in a place where the way to conduct life is to never mention race. Maybe that was an American thing in general, but it was very much a Southern thing, at that time. It was so fraught, it was not talked about. When somebody would say, “What’s your nationality?” That one always drove me crazy. My nationality is USA. [laughs] But you’d be going through life forgetting that you don’t look like the people around you. And then somebody would ask you something that reminds you and you think, “Oh, right. I don’t blend in.” I started writing “My Life in Peaches” because I was looking at a crate of Pennsylvania peaches. I had no plan going into all that. The funny thing, of course, is that the peach is the emblem of Georgia. But it’s indigenous to China.

  JWB: In “When I Said I Grew Up Speaking No Chinese, I Was Forgetting These Words,” you describe the fried food “Tee-doy”: “one of my father’s home dialects, Fuzhou or Gutian, I don’t know which, understanding / neither. Deep-fried spherical pastries made of glutinous rice flour …” I love the humor and your humility, saying “I can’t pronounce these words myself.” It’s so disarming.

  AS: I don’t know if this is evident, but I feel the book is a kind of elegy, because I wrote it during the time my father was declining. I knew that this was the end, so I was reaching back for connections, like these pastries in the toaster oven, in the poem. I mean, usually we reheat things in the microwave, but these Tee-doy, which are deep fried and crispy, are horrible out of the microwave; you have to put them in the oven. They’re super heavy, really greasy. You can’t eat that many of them. During this time I learned that my father had two home dialects. As his cognition was failing, he talked about his mother’s home dialect, Gutian, which is, I think, pretty obscure. Everybody knows Mandarin, Cantonese, maybe Shanghainese. Fuzhou dialect is getting less obscure here because a lot of immigrants are now from Fuzhou. Restaurants are run by people who speak Fuzhou: the dialect of my father’s father’s family. The town my father grew up in is not Fuzhou, but downriver. I don’t think it had its own dialect. But what do I know? [laughs] Gutian was not super far away. And yet, it’s such an old country. I think travel was difficult for thousands of years. So the language would be different only fifty miles away. In his illness, my dad talked about this dialect of his mother, as he really hadn’t before. I guess he’d had no reason to talk about it. When people have dementia, they start remembering the early things. So I’m always going to these immigrant grocery stores and my brother is saying, “Why are you going to another grocery store? Do you need groceries already?” “I’m looking for the past,” I tell him. Or “I’m looking for our ancestors.” Maybe he doesn’t care because I’m doing it. That is, somebody’s taking care of that.

  JWB: I’m haunted by the great-great-grandmother in “Home Economics”: “When I curse myself, again, for failing / to use each lettuce leaf, the last tomato, / before decay set in, the phantom shaking // her head is a great-great-grandmother / appalled by her distant offspring….”

  AS: Most of us never meet our great-great-grandmothers. But I never even met my grandmother, my father’s mother. Maybe because everything happened on the other side of the world, I feel like it’s all cut off. I have to imagine everything. I know my father’s family was very frugal with food; they didn’t waste anything. Of course, I’m an American, I’m always wasting. [laughs]

  JWB: “Home Economics” continues: “an American who never watched a river // rise above its banks like a cold volcano, / who burns the stew while also forgetting / the sprouting onions and potatoes.” Beautiful, but pointing to you as somebody who doesn’t know the deep stories. Who’s locked out of the old culture.

  AS: Yeah, and who never lived through a famine. Much as I feel guilty, and I think we all feel guilty when we waste food, this sense of abundance comes from growing up here in America. I think that becomes part of us. We don’t worry about waste too much. If it doesn’t cost that much, then, “Okay, we might not use it all. That’s all right.” But then I tried to revise the grandmother: I think maybe she’s a figure up in the sky who’s watching everything, and that she actually does have the context. And maybe she’s not so harsh.

  JWB: Your poem “White Rabbit” touches on this sense of rarity and plenty. Is White Rabbit an example of candy that was plentiful when you were a kid, but you knew it wouldn’t have been plentiful in China?

  AS: White Rabbit was plentiful in China, scarce in Atlanta. There were certain foods you couldn’t get often, so they seem special. There were moments when there’d be a lot of them because it was a holiday, and everybody had made an effort to get them. White Rabbit wasn’t impossible to get. But it wasn’t something you could just pick up at the grocery store, like M&Ms. You had to make a special trip. There is a retro candy store in Carlisle. When I go into it, I feel weirdly erased. I mean, it’s fun. It’s meant to be a fun place to think about past eras and whatever sort of nostalgic snacks there were. The key to that nostalgia is the complete absence of White Rabbit.

  JWB: So when White Rabbit is plentiful, it’s the opposite of the actual memory.

  AS: Yeah. It was only plentiful at, say, a Chinese New Year gathering, when somebody has made a trip to some special store and gotten a bunch of White Rabbits and told the kids take as many as you like, and it felt amazing, because normally you’d get one bag and have to make it last. Also, as I talk about in the poem, there are Chinese characters on the label of White Rabbit, meaning “big,” “white,” and “rabbit.” [laughs] There’s no mystery to it. But part of traveling back to the 50s in our imagination is also to fear communism, as they did in America. So—someone fearful and suspicious might ask—this candy coming out of China with these unreadable characters on it, what if that’s some sort of Communist propaganda? My poem responds, “It says BIG—WHITE—RABBIT.” Again, it’s complicated. It’s the feeling of being a kid and eating this candy on those rare days when there’s tons of it. But it’s sparked by being an adult who goes into the retro candy store and thinks, “Well, I know why there aren’t White Rabbits in the store.” Right? That wouldn’t really be representative of the 50s decade. But there were other reasons to keep White Rabbit out at the time. The Cold War. China and the Soviet Union on their side with their candy. [laughs] Then over here, Bazooka gum. The White Rabbit becomes an enemy, or representative of an enemy, in that nostalgia.

  JWB: The “abundance” of America, this feeling that we have so many choices—as compared with the sparsity and famine that your ancestors suffered—is one way of looking at it. But underneath all of this abundance in the US is also a kind of dearth.

  AS: Anywhere there is abundance in a society, it’s going to be of the things that people are accustomed to. Having an ongoing awareness that there is this other supply of things that aren’t showing up creates a kind of emotional dearth. I’m glad you used that word “dearth.” Because it’s not that there was nothing to eat; it’s that there were certain things that you might crave that you couldn’t get if your background had made you appreciate and care about those things.

  JWB: One of your poems responds to Calvin Trillin’s 2016 poem, “Have They Run Out of Provinces Yet?” He says, “So we sometimes do miss, I confess, / Simple days of chow mein but no stress, / When we never were faced with the threat / Of more provinces we hadn’t met. / Is there one tucked away near Tibet? / Have they run out of provinces yet?” Clearly this comes from an “us” and “them” attitude: “us” being white folks, and “them” being Asian folks. It sounds dismissive, and possibly much worse. Your poem “The Chow-Mein Years in Atlanta” provides the other side, in a really human way: “My father, repairing the attic or cellar, // was working more than he made it appear / so that some in Fujian might escape state control.”

  AS: I think the reason that uproar surrounding Trillin’s poem hit me so hard was that I had been writing poems about Chinese food in America, and I had been a reader of Trillin for a long time because I followed food writing. So I knew that he had expertise in Chinese food and appreciation of it. This is why I couldn’t just say, “He’s awful.” That would not be an interesting poem. I felt a little hurt. Like, “Wait a minute, you know about the food, right? You appreciate it? I know you’re making a joke, but something’s off here with the usage.” My response wasn’t to denounce him, because I don’t find a poem in that. I didn’t feel like denouncing him, because I had some idea of where he was coming from. He just kind of forgot. Maybe. [laughs]

  JWB: I mean, that’s generous. To me, his poem dehumanizes. And your poem humanizes.

  AS: Yeah. I think I was trying to recreate the “them” and turn it into “us.” It was bugging me. I couldn’t not respond, but I wanted to write something that I’d be able to stand by, that didn’t just say something angry. And I think it interacted with my grief. I was thinking about my parents aging and one day being gone, and what Trillin calls the “days of chow mein.” Everybody has those days early in their life: early family memories in the context of an era. I asked myself, “Oh, what were those chow mein days?” There was a time when the chow mein genre was the only Chinese food we could get in Atlanta. Trillin was in New York, so he had better selection. We, in Atlanta, went to those restaurants with the same old menu geared toward a mainstream American customer. But we loved it. My parents didn’t say “This is fake. That’s not how it supposed to be.” We just ate it. And we enjoyed it. So it was also a day of non-food snobbery. That was Chinese food, for us. And I’m really glad my parents didn’t ruin it for us. Trillin’s poem reminds me, I remember a textbook from maybe third grade, that said there are three human races: Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid. Can you believe that! Thinking back on this—what was the context of those years? I remember the drawings in the textbook, these three heads of people. And of course, I didn’t know to be upset then. I think I was upset because it seemed … repellent. But I couldn’t articulate why.

  JWB: Would you comment on Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet, your book of essays which is due at Paul Dry’s doorstep very soon?

  AS: It should be submitted sometime today. Like Peach State, it goes back and forth between poetry and food a lot. I like to think of it as “How I became a poet.” So much of how I became a poet is related to food, it seems. There are a number of interviews in the book. There’s also an anecdote from when I was studying abroad in China. Not all of my mother’s family was able to leave China when the Communists took over. My maternal grandfather’s brother didn’t leave. He had come from a bourgeois background, so he was sent to a remote outpost to work in a fur factory. This is one of the worst things that could have happened to him because he loved animals and opera, and because he was exiled from Shanghai to the southwest of China, far from his community and the urban arts. You’re basically being punished for having been who you were. I was in Shanghai, and had never met him. He took a three-day train across the country to meet me. And he’d made me a gift. It was a coat made of dog fur. It was so hard for me to know how to feel about that. You could say, “Oh my God, no.” But you can’t, since his whole life had been condemned. He didn’t have the luck to leave. So the essay steps into my conflicting feelings and asks, “What do I do? How do I feel?”

• ArtsATL - https://www.artsatl.org/adrienne-su-takes-a-poetically-rich-culinary-tour-of-atlanta-in-peach-state/

  Adrienne Su takes a poetically rich culinary tour of Atlanta in “Peach State”
  BETH WARD·APRIL 22, 2021
  Georgia-born poet Adrienne Su’s latest collection, Peach State (University of Pittsburgh Press, 88 pages), is a passport.

  Its evocative, digestible poems take readers on a culinary trip from the Atlanta’s suburbs of Su’s childhood, to the explosive Buford Highway international food scene, all the way to her parent’s China and back again. There are villanelles that pay homage to chopsticks, verses that make glorious instant Ramen noodles, words that eulogize a food-court ice cream shop and sanctify what Su calls “the chow mien years” of her youth.

  Peach State gives readers a tour of home kitchens, grocery stores and Chinese restaurants, gives them a taste of “Sizzling Rice Soup,” “Black Sesame” and “Oolong” and invites them to travel the beautiful tension between Su’s two culinary and cultural histories.

  Adrienne SuAsian American author and artist Chanel Miller recently wrote that “in many Asian cultures, feeding is the strongest way of saying ‘I love you.’” Peach State, in its rendering of the food that feels most like home to its author, manifests that sentiment. It’s a love letter to the meals and memories that connect Su to her ancestors, to her parents and her children, to China and to the American South.

  Su is the poet-in-residence at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She recently spoke to ArtsATL about how food inspires her poetry, her favorite Chinese dishes and finding the miraculous in the mundane.

  ArtsATL: You’re from Atlanta. You were born and raised here, though you live in Pennsylvania now. When you think about growing up, how do you think the city influenced you turning toward poetry?

  Adrienne Su: I grew up in suburbia, and I think a lot of kids in suburbia — it’s idyllic when you’re a little kid, and then as you get older, you get kind of annoyed. You kind of wish there was more community. And I didn’t feel like I could find poets, really. At the time — though it’s different now — there weren’t a lot of people who came to Atlanta for the poetry readings.

  I was lucky in that I had some great teachers, and I found a workshop at Georgia State that had been created through the initiative of a couple of people there who were offering these workshops for high-school students. That was really exciting. But how Atlanta led me to being a poet? I don’t know if it did.

  ArtsATL: When you come from a suburb, it can feel like coming from no place, because everything is generic. It’s strip malls and chain restaurants. So you have to imagine a place into being. Maybe having to do that is itself a kind of poetic thinking. And given that that’s kind of the relationship you had to the suburbia you grew up in, why did you consider Atlanta the right framework for your new collection?

  Su: I was always going [back] to Atlanta. And if it weren’t for COVID, I would still be going there all the time because I have family there. And I think I was both excited about how much better the Chinese food is now than it was when I was kid, and what that means about larger changes in Atlanta’s population.

  It also made me think about the experiences I had with other Chinese Americans [growing up]. We didn’t live near each other, necessarily. There was just this kind of loose network of Chinese Americans because there were so few. That’s kind of gone now because there’s no longer a tiny population. I’m glad it’s not tiny, but I also don’t want that time to be forgotten.

  So I just kept on going, in my head, to Atlanta, while working on this [collection], and it just turned into Peach State. I’m like a lot of poets in that I had no idea what this was going to be called until I had finished writing it. I knew it was Atlanta-centered, but as you know, a lot of the poems don’t mention Atlanta, and you can’t really tell that they take place there if you look at them by themselves. But then once they’re together in the book, maybe it becomes clearer.

  Adrienne Su
  When Adrienne Su’s parents moved from China to Atlanta, they improvised their native cuisine because of a lack of ingredients and the fact there were only four Chinese restaurants in the city. (Photo by Carl Socolow)
  ArtsATL: You dedicate this collection, in part, to your parents. Their history and heritage is this invisible framework that holds all of these stories together. What can you tell us about them as far as how they relate to the collection? What were some of their culinary traditions as you grew up?

  Su: They arrived quite early. My dad arrived in 1948 and my mom a bit later. So they were used to not being able to eat Chinese food. There were, according to my parents, four Chinese restaurants in Atlanta in the early years. I don’t know if that means when my dad got there, when my mom got there, but they kind of had this joke going where they’d say, “Yeah, there were four Chinese restaurants when we got here, and now there are 400!”

  I had delved into cookbooks written in English on Chinese food published in the ’60s and ’70s because I wanted to imagine what people were who were trying to cook Chinese food — whether they were of Chinese descent or not — what were people in the U.S. cooking when they wanted to make Chinese food?

  And that’s what we ate because you couldn’t get so many of the [authentic] ingredients. My parents were never snobs about [Chinese] restaurants trying to appeal to an American audience. That’s all we had, so we enjoyed it. And that’s why there are poems about things like Mongolian beef, and hot and sour soup, those sort of mainstream dishes you see. We loved them.

  ArtsATL: Was there ever a sense of homesickness that you think maybe your parents navigated through the food they did have access to?

  Su: I think there had been, maybe before I was born. They were in Atlanta for quite a while before they had kids, so it was mostly in the form of stories I heard from them.

  For instance, they couldn’t buy tofu. They got together with friends and mail-ordered the ingredients for making tofu from New York, Chinatown. But then everyone had to get together and do this giant project. I don’t know how to make tofu — apparently it’s not easy. And of course, they had to probably order so much, and then once it’s made, it doesn’t keep that long. So it was probably this huge thing where all these families got together and did this thing, just to have [an ingredient like tofu] briefly.

  There were always adaptations. After I published my poem about the fried rice with hot dogs in it, I heard from other Asian Americans, “Oh, that’s what my mom did, too” because you couldn’t get Chinese sausage.

  ArtsATL: Do recipes feel like stories to you?

  Su: The recipe does feel a little bit, to me, like a poetic form in that it has that structure. And why not a story, really? You start with this pile of stuff — I love it when you look in your fridge to fix something to eat, kind of pick up this and that, and an hour later you have a meal — and you think, “Wow, I just made something out of nothing.”

  And a lot of the time, that doesn’t get written down. People just create something. They eat it. And then it’s forgotten. So in that way, a recipe might actually be a story that should be written down.

  Adrienne Su
  Adrienne Su is the poet-in-residence at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. Her poetry, she says, is the search to show the miraculous in everyday life.
  ArtsATL: How do you think the creativity required to be a generative poet has made you a more creative cook?

  Su: There are days when it’s the opposite in that I want to put my energy into a poem, so I just want a recipe that I can just blindly follow to save time. But other times, having put a lot of thought into the food, I will then turn around and do something differently [in a poem].

  My poem, “On the Recommendation That American Adults Consume No More Than One-Quarter Cup of Rice, Twice a Week,” I was mad about that for years. I just kept on going, “You can’t eat rice? Really?”

  That poem took me a long, long time to figure out how to write. I tried to write that poem many times. After I wrote it, I suddenly felt free from that oppression. And I actually did start doing some of the things [with food] I said in the poem. So now that I’ve issued my rejoinder to the anti-rice coalition, I actually don’t have to eat as much rice [laughs].

  ArtsATL: You’ve mentioned that in your poetry, you’re really interested in looking at and elevating the mundane in our lives, the quotidian, rather than the grand and romantic — small things like your everyday chopsticks in “After the Dinner Party,” or a container of Chobani yogurt in “Wakefulness” that don’t become beautiful until you turn them into poetry. Can you talk to me a bit about that?

  Su: I think I have followed the example of many other poets. I just think that reading poems in which the ordinary takes on all this other power has trained my eye.

  One of the first poems that I read that did that was Sharon Olds’ poem “The Missing Boy.” It’s thinking about how this child has disappeared, just thinking about how, wherever he is, he wants the food that he’s used to. There’s something about thinking about what he wants to eat that makes him real, and makes us feel something about him.

  Also, in those early years of becoming a writer, there’s a lot of excitement and romance around creative activity. And then you realize, “Oh, my life is really kind of the same as everybody else’s. I don’t really have any exceptional experiences.” So then you have to figure out, “Well, am I just going to not write, or am I going to try to show what is miraculous in the everyday?” And then, part of writing — everybody learns this, too — you just keep trying, and sometimes the yogurt cup becomes something else.

  ArtsATL: And what’s next?

  Su: It’s been a really weird year, so I haven’t really focused on getting the next project started, because it’s felt like an emergency for so long. One of my big questions to myself has been, “Do I still get to write about food? Do I have to let go of it?” Because I still want to, but I also want to make sure I’m pushing myself not to repeat what I’ve already done. But then maybe food has potential in other ways.

• The Adroit Journal - https://theadroitjournal.org/2021/06/15/remember-imagine-a-conversation-with-adrienne-su/

  INTERVIEW
  JUNE 15, 2021
  REMEMBER & IMAGINE: A CONVERSATION WITH ADRIENNE SU
  by ELIZABETH MARIE BOLAÑOS

  Adrienne Su is the author of five books of poems: Peach State (Pitt, 2021), Living Quarters (Manic D Press, 2015), Having None of It (Manic D, 2009), Sanctuary (Manic D, 2006), and Middle Kingdom (Alice James Books, 1997). Her work has been recognized by fellowships from the Barbara Deming Fund and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as several appearances in Best American Poetry. She teaches at Dickinson College.

  ***

  Elizabeth Marie Bolaños: Peach State is ripe with food’s connection to your identity, a theme that lives in much of your previous work too. Have you ever created a meal solely inspired by a special moment in your life?

  Adrienne Su: There was a time when I put together abundant meals, often with unfamiliar recipes, on the slightest pretext, for fun: in graduate school and other “starving artist” circumstances, I was always having dinner parties. Then one day, all at once, I had a full-time teaching job and a newborn. Holiday meals and birthday cakes had no leeway for disasters, so for officially “special” days when my children were very young, I favored the tried and true. Still, it wasn’t long before even they were up for trying something new, such as a birthday cake piled with homemade marshmallows (I can’t take credit for that recipe). In any case, time-management challenges have taught me, more generally, not to be over-invested in how things turn out. Some of the most joyful and imaginative cooking arises from making what you can from what happens to be on hand. Homemade pizza does this well, as you can make a smattering of vegetable bits, leftover meat, cured things from jars (artichokes, olives), and odds and ends of cheese into a dinner that looks and tastes intentional. Cooking and writing are similar in this way: it goes best when you’re not under pressure to perform; if you practice enough, once you let go of the idealized result, it takes off.

  EB: You explore food in layers that feel tangible, as if each poem is edible with its own unique flavors. I felt the bittersweet ones lingered with me the longest. Do you ever feel this way when writing, as if you’re composing a meal?

  AS: I appreciate this notion of eating the poem, with bitter and sweet balancing each other out. You’ve reminded me of the many ways writing parallels the composition of a meal, where you need a balance of flavors, textures, colors, boldness, and neutrality, and it all has to make nutritional sense. Most home cooks have inadvertently produced a beige dinner―mashed potatoes, broiled cod, and steamed cauliflower―that’s perfectly nourishing and even delicious but visually comic, a little off-putting. You don’t go back and revise the meal―you laugh and have dinner and that’s the end of it. In writing, you not only get to revise, you have to, because that poem may be served over and over to who knows how many people. There probably is some synesthesia to revising, an intuitive moment when the poem generates, for instance, the right color, texture, heat level (in temperature or spice), or feeling of having had a good meal. Pulling the poem into its finished shape is like identifying the missing element for a salad: the orange pepper or pickled onion or slivered pear that meets not only a flavor, smell, or texture requirement but also a visual one, because eating, when you pay attention, is an aesthetic experience as well as a functional one.

  EB: I love the line “Our story began when my parents arrived as immigrants,” from the poem “Personal History.” Was the idea for the book inside you for a while, brought upon gradually, suddenly?

  AS: Miraculously, it was there, waiting for me to find it. Once I identified it, by writing a sabbatical proposal, a gate opened. I had a better perspective on my previous poems as well; they had been circling this book without my explicit knowledge. Of course, the actual writing still took a long time, and assembling the final manuscript was the same struggle it always is, but I could see parts of the whole coming together sooner than with previous books.

  EB: Did you visit Georgia while creating this collection? Or do any traveling for that matter?

  AS: Whenever I could. It was in large part to see my parents and other relatives, but every visit also renewed my perspective on early experiences and helped me imagine my parents’ lives there before I was born. As a teenager, I sometimes resented that our restaurant-going skewed so heavily Chinese, when restaurants of all kinds were opening in Atlanta. I wanted to try the foods of more countries. But my maternal grandparents were living in Atlanta then, and while they loved a good steakhouse, they often chose the restaurant for us all. My grandfather was effusive about food in a way that perhaps shows up in my voice on the page; he loved to narrate, like a sportscaster, as dishes arrived, and photographed the food, long before photo-taking became free and easy. Returning to that landscape, where the restaurants have multiplied and attracted national attention, prompts me to remember and imagine. I’m speaking in terms of when I was writing the book. Today, after over a year without travel and with immense challenges for restaurants, I worry about how that landscape will look when I can visit again. As background work for Peach State, my mother and I would occasionally drive by the shell of a closed restaurant we used to frequent as a family. One day we parked in front of one of the oldest, of which I had only a vague visual memory, and tried to imagine the modest building―it had become a Thai restaurant―in its old incarnation. I was so young in its day that without my mother, I wouldn’t have been able to find it. Other trips included New York, where I visited food exhibits at the Museum of Chinese in America and the Museum of Food and Drink, and San Francisco, where I was doing readings from Living Quarters but also took the chance to see family friends, who shared some of the early scenarios in Peach State.

  EB: One of my favorite poems is “When I Said I Grew Up Speaking No Chinese, I Was Forgetting These Words.” Can you tell me a little about the process for creating this one?

  AS: Thank you for liking it! Much of the background work for Peach State involved immersion in cookbooks, many of which were quirkily indexed. Browsing them was great, but when I wanted to look up something specific, dishes and ingredients became elusive, even in some books with rigorous indexing. I realized that I had never known what certain foods were called, or I had learned only an approximate name for them. Regionalisms, romanizations, and pronunciations―never mind translations―were all over the place, and it wasn’t just me: there was no consensus on what to call them. My own parents, who grew up speaking different dialects of Chinese, might each have a different name for the same food, and a family friend who grew up speaking yet another dialect might have still another name for it. As a result, some of the foods I was trying to remember were effectively hidden, even―sometimes especially―from an internet search. That even a person who grew up eating these foods (a poet whose medium is language) could not definitively name them gnawed at me. In childhood you trust that older generations can keep track but later realize that older generations won’t always be around.

  EB: Some of the poems unearth racial issues which still poison society today, but you educate the ignorant through your lens of experience.

  AS: It’s gratifying to hear this perspective. When writing, I’m suspicious of any desire on my part to educate, lest the poem turn out didactic, so I go into the process looking for something I need to learn. Yet I also feel an urgency about the racial issues you mention and think I would be dishonest not to engage with them.

  EB: I love when you talk about food with personification. In the poem “Instant Ramen” for instance, instant ramen was mocked so you wanted to defend it, inform the mockers of its culinary potential.

  AS: Thank you! I think the foods we associate with being nurtured as children―if we were fortunate enough to be nurtured―are never entirely inanimate, within our deepest selves. That’s one reason it can be so hard to give them up later, if advised to for health or environmental reasons. My hope is that “Instant Ramen” expresses something most people have felt, if not necessarily toward the same food.

  EB: Were there any poems you made that you enjoyed but felt shouldn’t be included in this collection?

  AS: Quite a few poems didn’t make the cut. Some were simply weaker than others; some covered the same territory in ways that didn’t add enough; others turned out not to fit. Writing those poems wasn’t a waste though: I think of them as part of the drafting process for the book. Only after I started repeating myself could I be sure I’d said all that needed saying; taking redundant poems out is easier than creating missing ones to order. The drawback is that working this way is time-intensive, in a world in which writing time is scarce for all but a very few. Occasionally I write a poem that I later decide shouldn’t be published in case it hurts someone, but that’s a disappointment. I write to connect with readers and to participate in the conversation among poets.

  EB: Is there a poem here you feel especially close to? A heart of the collection maybe? I felt a sense of this in “My Life in Peaches.”

  AS: This is a terrific question. I haven’t previously thought of the poems in this way. I might point to the final poem, “An Hour Later, You’re Hungry Again,” as reflective of a family ritual that, while it’s situated in childhood, speaks to every stage of life and could include everyone in my extended family. It also captures the connection between family and restaurants for many Chinese Americans. But “My Life in Peaches” is more of a distillation of the book, since it invokes images and ideas that occur throughout Peach State: suburban grocery stores, the city of Atlanta, the state of Georgia, car culture, Chinese art objects, traditional Southern food, immigrant thrift. It may also be a poem that doesn’t stand alone as much as others, as it’s so enmeshed in conversation with the rest of the book. In that sense, it may well be the heart.

• Phi Beta Kappa Society website - https://www.pbk.org/su-behind-the-key

  Adrienne Su
  Adrienne Su (ΦΒΚ, Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges) is the author of five books of poems, "Middle Kingdom," "Sanctuary," "Having None of It," "Living Quarters," her newest, "Peach State." Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she is a professor of creative writing and poet-in-residence at Dickinson College,

  img-item-1img-item-2img-item-1img-item-3
  As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
  I knew from the age of six that I wanted to be a writer. At that point, I thought being a writer meant writing fiction. I wrote stories and illustrated them, first on paper, later on my father’s manual typewriter. I think I was seven when I started attempting poetry, then kept writing both, only giving up fiction in my mid-twenties. By early adulthood, I knew that poetry came more naturally, that my focus was more on language than on character or plot, but I fought the notion that I might be “just” a poet. I wanted to write in a genre that was widely read and might earn money. But while fiction writers sell more books than poets, most don’t live on their writing, either. It’s just as well I went with my strengths.

  What was the most transformative course from your undergraduate education?
  There were so many, I’m tempted to call it a five-way tie among various language courses, poetry workshops, and religion courses, but if I had to name one, it might be “The Sacred Geography of Traditional China,” which brought all of those strands together. It contained several of the elements that informed my development as a poet: interaction between languages, imagining China, and a focus on tangible things, such as mountains, flora, and fauna, in the service of understanding the ineffable. I wouldn’t have been able to explain it at the time, but having spent my formative years imagining China – this place I had never seen, this place that had made my parents – I was fascinated to discover that the discipline of East Asian Studies existed: people made careers out of something that had been the backdrop to my whole life. Of course, they were doing research while I was doing something vague and ill-defined, but when I sat at a table in the reading room in the Harvard-Yenching Library and opened a writing notebook, I felt an affinity with the others in that room.

  What role has your liberal arts education played in the development of your career as a poet? Why do you think Phi Beta Kappa and a well-rounded arts and sciences education are important in today’s society?
  I was fortunate to have gone to college already knowing knowing that I wanted to write. Since there’s no set course of study for becoming a creative writer, the liberal arts education allowed me to study whatever would help me identify and articulate what my writing might be for – to find my subject, as the expression goes, even though poetry is seldom “about” a particular thing. Now that I advise undergraduate students, I know that liberal arts students are there to learn how to learn: how to evaluate sources, how to think critically and creatively, how to reconcile contradictory ideas, and how to write well – which means being able to imagine what is going on in the mind of the reader. Phi Beta Kappa recognizes students whose record embodies these principles, which are different from simply being smart or mastering a body of knowledge. There are not many other places where this form of recognition occurs. I graduated from college without completing my major, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, which I loved but for a variety of reasons didn’t see through to the last requirement. Phi Beta Kappa didn’t hold that against me.

  Your latest poetry collection, Peach State, was published this past year. What does the day-to-day of work being a poet entail? What do you enjoy most about your career?
  Although the poetry world has a few superstars, it’s extremely rare for a poet to make a living from books or speaking engagements; almost all poets do something else. For me and many others, teaching is a meaningful way to support writing. Although I often have to put writing aside for teaching, advising, and administrative tasks, writing poems is in my job description. There are sabbaticals; there is support for writing-related travel; I get to choose all the books I assign. I thrive in a college setting, with its libraries, intellectual conversations, guest lecturers, people from all over the world, and undergraduate students who ask broad questions faculty might forget to ask ourselves if we lived fully inside our disciplines. What I enjoy most about being a poet is connecting with other poets and their poems – seeing our solitary labor turn into human connection. Those connections often outlive the poet. I’ve been to many tributes to late poets and am always amazed by how fully one person’s work – even when it attracted less critical attention than it deserved – touched other lives and helped beget other creative work.

  What was the best advice you were ever given and who gave it to you?
  Like the courses, this is hard to narrow down, but the advice that comes immediately to mind was given by one of my graduate-school mentors at the University of Virginia, Gregory Orr, who said, “Poems aren’t made of ideas; they’re made of words.” The remark didn’t unleash a torrent of poems; rather, it stuck with me permanently. I think of it when I fall into the trap of believing that I need an idea – a concept, a topic, a principle – to start writing creatively. Often, a writer’s notion of what a piece of writing is going to say is static, which makes the writing unexciting. If you pay close enough attention to the words you’re choosing, or simply follow a word that’s haunting you, rather than holding fast to the idea you think you need to communicate, you may surprise yourself. Formal constraints such as rhyme can also head off well-intended but predictable statements. Having to write a line that ends in something that rhymes with “California” sends your mind to new places.

  Phi Beta Kappa’s motto is “the love of learning is the guide of life,” and we are dedicated to life-long learning. What do you want to learn next?
  Now that so much of what we do has gone online, my wrists are complaining, so I’m learning to navigate my computer by voice. The experience has heightened my empathy for those who must rely on accessibility tools all the time; although speech recognition is sometimes miraculous, it can be immensely frustrating. I’ve also gained greater understanding of the writing process: for me, thinking on the page is a physical process involving the hands. I can’t dictate a good sentence, though maybe one day I will get there. The thought-process difference between pen and keyboard is substantial, as is the difference between cursive and print writing. I’m sorry so many schools have stopped teaching cursive.

  What book(s) are you reading right now? Are you listening to any podcasts or watching any shows? Anything you'd recommend?
  Among others, I’m reading Louise Glück’s newest collection of poems, Winter Recipes from the Collective, which refuses conventional narrative while offering particulars that suggest a lived life. It feels as worldly as it does otherworldly. And it does invoke “recipes,” another passion of mine. As many cookbooks as poetry books are piled around me; most recently, I picked up Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown by Brandon Jew. While most of the recipes are labor-intensive enough that I’m unlikely to make them, I’m fascinated by the mixing and remixing the dishes demonstrate, breaking down popular notions of Chinese food and constructing something new that’s nonetheless shaped by Chinese culinary aesthetics.

  Horrified by the war in Ukraine, I’ve recently listened to more news and political analysis than usual, especially the BBC’s "Global News" Podcast, The New Yorker’s "Politics and More," and "The Argument" from the New York Times. The language is not poetic, but part of a poet’s job is to observe. The poet’s response may be indirect and, in a journalistic sense, untimely, but because war will unfortunately always be with us, the search for language that makes something comprehensible out of the incomprehensible remains essential.

  I’ve also been listening to the Poetry Foundation’s “Audio Poem of the Day”; recent picks that resonated were Philip Levine’s “During the War,” Mark Halliday’s “Poetry Failure,” and Paisley Rekdal’s “Happiness.”

  April is National Poetry Month. Who are other poets that inspire you and your work?
  This is always a hard question because I know I will leave so many out, but here are a few from over the years: I treasure Lucie Brock-Broido’s blending of the morbid and the hilarious; Stanley Kunitz’s rigorous honesty; my late friend Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan’s imagery and formal mastery; Gerald Stern’s exuberance and affirmations. Thanks to Zoom, several excellent poets made virtual visits to my classes in the last two years: Rick Barot, Rita Dove, Denise Duhamel, Shara McCallum, Mark Halliday, Martha Silano, Mark Wunderlich. Classes are back in person now, but we are still beaming in poets from afar; coming up are virtual visits by Faith Shearin and Natasha Trethewey, plus an in-person visit by Jan Wagner, the current Max Kade Writer-in-Residence at Dickinson College. Sharing the company of poets I admire with my students occupies its own category of meaningful connection. It brings back my own early excitement upon meeting poets and realizing that literature – a term generally associated with dead, superhuman personalities – is made by living, breathing, and perfectly human human beings.

• Massachusetts Review - https://www.massreview.org/node/7571

  10 Questions for Adrienne Su
  OCTOBER 7, 2019 - BY EMILY WOJCIK

  Photo by Guy Freeman.

  “It doesn’t have to be unfeminist
  to carry them across the bridge

  if you meant to spend the morning
  this way, and know he’s savoring

  the gesture (and will wash the bowl). . . .“—from “Across the Bridge Noodles,” Volume 60, Issue 3 (Fall 2019)

  Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
  The first poem I remember writing was about a rose, although I had no interest in roses. I was seven and thought poems had to be about revered objects. Luckily I got over that early.

  What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
  High-school Latin gave me an awareness of meter, a love of form, and a connection to the origins of many English words. About a decade ago I did a reading in Málaga, Spain, where someone pointed out that I tend to use a Latinate vocabulary—something I hadn’t noticed. I’ve also been influenced by the use of form by contemporary poets, including Maxine Kumin, Donald Justice, and Molly Peacock. But I was also influenced by Lucie Brock-Broido, as both poet and teacher, and was drawn to the University of Virginia’s MFA program by the poems of Rita Dove.

  What other professions have you worked in?
  I worked as a magazine editor at Scholastic right out of college and got through the “starving-artist” years doing freelance editing and writing for educational publishers. I also tried to become a food writer or food editor but was too much of a poet by temperament. I edited things down until almost nothing was left and resisted happy endings.

  What did you want to be when you were young?
  I was six when I decided I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t know it would be poetry; I thought “writer” meant fiction. In early childhood I loved art and thought I would stick with it, but it fell away when in high school I had to choose between art and foreign language. Art would probably have fallen away anyway; words are my natural medium.

  What inspired you to write this piece?
  On sabbatical three years ago, leafing through Chinese cookbooks old and new, I kept encountering a recipe translated as “Crossing-the-Bridge Noodles,” “Across-the-Bridge Noodles,” etc. At the same time, pho was becoming available in small towns across America, including mine, in rural Pennsylvania. The cookbooks described a relationship between Across-the-Bridge Noodles and pho, which makes sense, because Yunnan province shares a border with Vietnam. All of this made me less isolated, food-wise, where I live. Meanwhile, as a single parent with a full-time job, I’m often up against the tension between the desire to read/write and the pressure to plan, shop for, and prepare meals. That conflict, tempered by the satisfaction cooking can provide, made me want to consider the legend of the noodle dish.

  Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
  I grew up in Atlanta, with China—the place my parents came from but for decades couldn’t visit—as an imagined backdrop. Then I went north for college and, without intending to, never returned to Atlanta to live, though I have always visited. Over time, Atlanta became the place I imagine. It’s the locus of the collection I’m working on now. Since imagining China is a subset of imagining Atlanta, Atlanta is layered with all kinds of writing possibilities.

  Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
  Putting it first, when possible. Starting in longhand. Treating it as just another task, not a sacred calling. After a lifetime of writing with black or blue Parker ballpoint pens, I’m trying multicolored marker pens. The colors ratify synesthesia: this topic feels orange; the mood of this draft is dark purple.

  Who typically gets the first read of your work?
  I have a small group of geographically scattered writer friends, who check in with each other on Fridays, give or take. My neighbor, friend, and colleague Sharon O’Brien, author of the memoir The Family Silver, is a deeply trusted reader.

  If you could work in another art form what would it be?
  Cooking. I almost went to culinary school during the hard years between my MFA and finding a place in academia but after paying the initial deposit realized that it wasn’t that different from getting an MFA in another field and backed off.

  What are you working on currently?
  I’ve nearly finished a manuscript of poems that evoke an early generation of Chinese Americans in Atlanta – my parents’ generation, which arrived around the mid-twentieth century – through the evolution of Chinese food there. When my father reached Atlanta in 1948, the city had four Chinese restaurants. Now it’s an international food mecca. Foodies flock to Buford Highway, which in my youth was a nondescript road some hyphenated Americans knew but few others paid attention to. The transformation of my hometown is fertile creative territory.

  ADRIENNE SU is the author of four books of poems, most recently Living Quarters. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she teaches at Dickinson College, in Carlisle, PA. Recent poems appear in Bennington Review, New Ohio Review, Poetry, and Vinegar & Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance.

• New England Review - https://www.nereview.com/2017/05/18/adrienne-su/

  Behind the Byline
  Adrienne Su

  Poetry Editor Rick Barot chats with Adrienne Su about her collection-in-progress, family history, and food as a metaphor for the bittersweet taste of progress.

  RB: When you submitted your poems to us, you mentioned that they are part of a long project that centers on food. Can you say more about the project as a whole, and about the two poems in NER in particular?

  AS: This collection-in-progress began with the realization that my hometown, Atlanta, is turning into what I wished it were in my youth: an international city where large immigrant communities thrive, many languages are spoken, and food—whether at home or in restaurants—reflects that worldliness. Buford Highway, which in my teenage years was just one more of the obscure places my family went for dim sum, is now a foodie destination noted for stretches of signs in Chinese, Vietnamese, Spanish. For the most part, I’m glad about that. Having lived in small-town Pennsylvania for 17 years, I count on eating Chinese food whenever I go to Atlanta to see family.

  In Chinese-American terms, what makes the city’s transformation bittersweet is that it was built on the mostly-invisible efforts of the earliest immigrants, including my parents, who, at least racially, were pioneers. My father arrived in 1948, when the still-segregated city did not know what to do with people neither white nor black. My mother arrived in the mid-1950s, not yet having met my father. Each grew accustomed to being the only “Oriental” person in the room, or one of few. Although both came from families with connections to the West, they had to re-create themselves while eating biscuits and gravy, and did so successfully.

  They gave me a great life. Maybe this is true of all people with good parents: they made home feel permanent, safe, and abundant with good food. They also developed a network of Chinese-American friends whose homes, though scattered in various white suburbs, were our homes, too. So I’ve never gotten over the injustice that their generation has grown old, many have passed away, and many of the kids have settled elsewhere, causing the houses to be sold. How could this be? Weren’t we going to have spring-roll parties in these kitchens forever, and run into each other at the good Chinese restaurants? And what are all those hipsters doing in our restaurants?

  Of course, all of this is normal, the passage of time, the American story, but it’s no less difficult for being the standard course of history. I started writing these poems when I realized that food was the best metaphor for it. Food is at the center of Chinese gatherings; food was the only thing I already understood when, in college, I studied abroad in Taiwan and China; losing beloved foods is one of the most poignant aspects of migration; and mainstream American foods of the 1970s—the kind we demean now—were also a formative part of my life.

  “Substitutions” was prompted by my reading of Fuchsia Dunlop’s introduction to a recipe for Dan Dan Noodles in her Sichuan cookbook Land of Plenty—a beautiful evocation of street-vendor cooking. For me it merged with other memories of street vendors my parents have cited, as well as my experiences with street food as a foreign student in Shanghai, in an era surely now lost there, too.

  “That Almond Dessert” arose from my reading of Chinese-American cookbooks from the 1960s. Somewhere I stumbled across the name “Almond Junket” and found it irresistible. That sent me to the Joyce Chen Cook Book, which my mother used when I was a child, and which evoked a longing for Almond Float—although I wasn’t sure whether I actually longed for it or just wanted childhood back. Eventually I made a batch, then another and another. I still love it and consider it a partner for canned fruit, but I’d rather have it with canned lychees or longyan than fruit cocktail.

  RB: Reading your poems, I was reminded of works by other writers—Maxine Hong Kingston, Don DeLillo, Li-Young Lee, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein immediately came to mind—where food is a crucial way of delving into themes like authenticity, nostalgia, desire, belonging, exile. As you wrote your food poems, what themes arose for you?

  AS: I’m honored by your list of literary giants. Writing these poems has been immensely satisfying. I’ve had a long preoccupation with both food and poetry but never so wholeheartedly brought them together. All of the themes you mention arise constantly, especially authenticity and nostalgia, both of which are prone to illusion and romanticizing. Exile is a major one. Other themes: the importance of ritual (both the progression of courses in a Chinese meal and, say, the habit of relying on instant ramen to get through a day), ideas of community (all of us belong to many, and it’s not always self-evident which ones), class (which overlaps with being an immigrant), power relationships (especially concerning cooking and domestic work), and always loss: in a way, this project is an elegy for a now-elderly generation of Chinese immigrants who embraced Atlanta, embraced the South, early on, despite the region’s reputation for racism—a reputation that drove most to favor New York and California.

  RB: “Substitutions” and “That Almond Dessert” show your exquisite skill with rhyme. Can you speak about rhyme’s appeal for you? And who are the poets whose rhyming—or, more broadly, their musicality—you admire?

  AS: Thank you! Rhyme helps me draft and rewrite a poem; without it, I easily lose my way or never find it to begin with. I also rely on a rhyme scheme to keep my mind from reaching a too-logical conclusion or relying too heavily on voice. And having a formal scheme, even a loose one, helps me know when a poem is finished. Writing free verse is more difficult for me, as there are too many choices. Often, all look equally good.

  A few beloved rhyming poets: Seamus Heaney, Donald Justice, Maxine Kumin, Randall Mann, Paul Muldoon, Molly Peacock. I went to UVa for graduate school because I heard Rita Dove read “Parsley” in 1988 or so; also at UVa, Charles Wright taught me a large proportion of what I know about form. Also, I spent a good chunk of high school clumsily trying to translate the Aeneid, which was a good, long lesson in meter.

  RB: This last question has become a standard closing question for me, because I’m always eagerly making lists of new things to read and listen to and see. Who or what are you recommending to others these days?

  AS: Carol Ann Duffy’s The Bees, especially as they buzz around in my backyard these days (and I hope they will continue to, despite what looks like climate apocalypse on the way). My late friend Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan’s last collection of poems, Bear, Diamonds and Crane, which I wish I could discuss with her, as it plumbs family history without sentimentality. My colleague Susan Perabo’s wry and wrenching new novel, The Fall of Lisa Bellow. My recent colleague Elise Levine’s new novel, Blue Field, written in language as compressed as poetry. James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, which I wish I had read decades ago. The soundtrack to “Hamilton.”

  Anne Mendelson’s Chow Chop Suey is the most engaging history of Chinese-American food I’ve found in my background work. That it was written by someone not fluent in Chinese is astounding, given its authority on food terminology in multiple Chinese dialects (each a language, Mendelson argues, in its own right). It puts in perspective a multitude of forces—among them the worldliness and resourcefulness of the earliest Cantonese immigrants to the US during the Gold Rush, China’s ancient tradition of restaurants, American discrimination through the Chinese Exclusion Act (in effect from 1882 to 1943), and racially motivated mob violence—that shaped the dishes most commonly found in American Chinese restaurants. Chow Chop Suey tells this history with the storytelling power of a novel; its postscript, “What Might Have Been,” dares to imagine that same period of Chinese immigration to the US without the political and economic persecution. It turns my current efforts at writing poems upside down in the best ways.

  ♦♦♦

  Adrienne Su is the author of four books of poems, most recently Living Quarters (Manic D Press, 2015). Recipient of an NEA fellowship, she teaches at Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Recent poems appear in Gargoyle, the New Yorker, and Poetry.

• Lantern Review - https://www.lanternreview.com/blog/2012/02/20/a-conversation-with-adrienne-su/

  February 20, 2012
  A Conversation with Adrienne Su

  Adrienne Su
  Adrienne Su is the author of three books of poems, Middle Kingdom (Alice James, 1997), Sanctuary (Manic D Press, 2006), and Having None of It (Manic D, 2009). Among her awards are a Puschart Prize and an NEA fellowship. She is poet-in-residence and chair of the English department at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. Recent poems are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, New England Review, and Hawai’i Pacific Review.

  ***

  LR: In the 1990s, you participated in the slam poetry revival, even going to the nationals for the NYC team in 1991. How did you move from the poetry slam world to your current place in academia?

  AS: I fell into the poetry slam by accident when I was too young to have a writerly identity and the slam was too young to have specific expectations of contestants. There was less of a page-stage divide. I saw no contradiction in reading my poems at the Nuyorican Poets Café while sending them to university-based literary journals. And the Nuyorican was a revelation. I’d never experienced writing in such a social way before. So while it may look as if I made a major transition over the years, I was really pursuing what I loved all along in whatever venues would have me. The people I met in both worlds had the same passions, though they may have been expressed differently on the surface.

  Getting into academia was a different story: you don’t get an academic job by accident. Even there, though, I thought my presence might be temporary. I started out as a sabbatical replacement and only gradually began to identify myself as a member of academia. Departing from the slam scene happened organically: I no longer lived in a city, I had children, and the slam itself had changed, requiring acting skills. Not long ago, I went back to the Nuyorican and saw a whole new generation of poets doing what “we” were doing twenty years earlier. It was terrific. For me, its time had come and gone, and that was fine.

  LR: You have stated in the past that your days in slam poetry taught you the value of connecting with people through the spoken word and reaching the non-university audience. How do you maintain that sense of the social in your work now?

  AS: I think I do this mainly by continuing to write poems that on some levels can be read by anyone.

  LR: Poetry of the academy and poetry that is accessible to non-literary audiences are often perceived as contradictory. As a poet of the academy with a spoken word past, how do you reconcile the two?

  AS: I think I address this somewhat in question 1, but I might add that academic institutions can also be great home bases for students to create spoken-word events. Students are doing this at Dickinson College, where I teach. I’d also suggest that as educators, we don’t have to treat “page” and “spoken-word” poems the same way in class. Some poems you need to pick apart. Some you can just listen to or watch, and discuss in a different way: that too is instructive. The poems that don’t need much interpretation can be the hardest to use in class. That requires some adaptation on the part of the teacher.

  LR: Parenting is a common subject in your poems. How do you balance being a working poet and a parent?

  AS: Time management cubed. Electronic reminders. Lunch at my desk.

  LR: After publishing three books of poems, what strategies have you found for moving from one book to another? How do you know when one book is finished and when the next is ready to begin?

  AS: I think I’m better at telling when one is finished than telling when a new one is ready to begin. The latter is much more difficult: you’re casting about in the void unless there’s a plan in place, which there rarely is. That said, I did have a plan for Having None of It.

  LR: Your last two books have been published by Manic D Press, while your first was published by Alice James Books. Though both Manic D and Alice James are small presses, each has a distinctly unique ethos. Can you talk about the experience of working with two different presses of different sizes and—presumably—of different editorial viewpoints? What attracted you to each of them? What advice would you give to young poets about selecting presses to which to send their work?

  AS: I was drawn to both for their devotion to the work, to keeping their books in print. AJB’s two-year work commitment was perfect for where I was in life at the time; even if I lived in the region now, I would have a much harder time traveling for regular meetings and reading manuscripts. Manic D has wonderful freshness and irreverence. As with AJB, Manic D is all about the work—and perhaps it’s in keeping with my poetry-slam past, which indeed is how Manic D and I made our first acquaintance (through their Poetry Slam anthology).

  HAVING NONE OF IT
  LR: The poems in Having None of It weave in and out of the weighty topics of immigration and family history with a lightness of touch, as in “Imagining China” and “Inheritance”. Similarly, you imbue lighter poems based on pop cultural experience, such as “Ode to a Lipstick”, “Even the Overachievers Had Barbies”, and “T.J. Maxx”, with deeper and darker layers of meaning. These poems seem to insist on the multiplicity of identity, that each individual has a multitude of facets—mother, lover, daughter, Chinese, American, academic, consumer, subject, and object. I am fascinated by your exploration of “otherness”—both in terms of gender and in terms of culture. Can you talk a bit about how these critical and political concerns bleed over into more practical considerations of craft?

  AS: Thank you for seeing the lightness and heaviness, which I do intend. Still, I may be the worst person to talk about such craft questions, as most of these things happened organically. When I was growing up, I didn’t see it as ironic that while I was viewed as Chinese, I knew no Chinese and thrived on the study of Latin. Non-Western languages and literature were not available for me to study. In college, I indulged my interest in them, taking Chinese and Japanese but on some level longing to be in the English department—and intending, of course, to be a writer in English. Everywhere I went, I was half in another place. It’s perfect displacement for being a poet.

  LR: The poems in Having None of It possess an effortlessness and simplicity of language that belies a rigorous experimentation with form. Some poems adhere more firmly to form, as in the blank verse couplets of “Inheritance,” and others deal with it more loosely, as a jazz musician might, as in the slant rhymes of “Having It All.” How is your relationship with form evolving through your career?

  AS: I’m not sure whether it’s evolving; it seems to be a pact between me and form. I keep wondering when I’m going to depart from it, but I keep going back. It’s how I find my way.

  LR: With the emergence of more Asian American poets in the field than ever before, audiences are becoming more accustomed to reflections of the Asian American experience. Do you perceive any changes in the way that identity is being dealt with in Asian American poetry, and in the way Asian American poets are being read? Has this affected the way you write and think about identity in your own writing?

  AS: It’s becoming more of a normal topic and less of an “ethnic” topic. This is good. It frees me and other Asian-American poets to address it without necessarily making an issue of it. It lets identity be just one more dimension of a poem, rather than its reason for being, and reduces the danger of falling into polemical territory.

  LR: Can you tell us about what you’re working on now?

  AS: My manuscript, The House Unburned, is—and I may be wrong here—about whether we shape our lives or they’re fated. I know that sounds absurd, but it doesn’t have as clear a subject as Having None of It does. Some of the poems are about food, others on love, others on laundry. What life is made of.

Su, Adrienne HOT, SOUR, SALTY, SWEET Paul Dry Books (NonFiction None) $19.95 8, 6 ISBN: 9781589881921

A poet and creative writing professor gathers a cross-genre, cooking-inspired collection of her writing from the last 30 years.

Atlanta native and food lover Su, author of Peach State and Living Quarters, selected these essays to represent "the conversational, 'prose' side of my body of work so far," offering valuable context to her poetry and life. In the first of five sections, the author explores the impact of her Asian heritage. In the wider context of her Southern upbringing, it helped to inform the enthusiastically "omnivorous" cultural and culinary sensibility that embraced mashed potatoes alongside her Chinese parents' beloved Fuzhou-style cuisine. She also pays tribute to the love of cooking that in an "alternate universe" might have led to a career as a food writer. Indeed, later essays, particularly those in the fourth section, "Sustenance, Culinary and Literary," reveal how cooking and food still influence her perception of her work. The order suggested by poetic forms like the sonnet, for example, inevitably reminds Su of the order she seeks in her kitchen and especially her cooking. In the essay "You Are What You Read," she suggests that the children's books people "consume" can produce stereotypical thinking about race and ethnicity. Su's wide-ranging interests as a writer unafraid of mingling flavors are evident throughout the book. While many of the pieces are personal, some celebrate mentors or beloved poet-friends or engage in critical analysis of poetry by such poets as Su's former classmate Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan. Still others take the form of interviews Su has done with a variety of publications, including the New England Review and the Best American Poetry blog. Seasoned with a dash of her meticulously crafted poetry and even a recipe, this collection celebrates words, culture, food, and the human act of making that binds them all together.

A literary gourmand's delight.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Su, Adrienne: HOT, SOUR, SALTY, SWEET." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A795674034/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=994973f4. Accessed 26 June 2024.

Peach State. By Adrienne Su. Mar. 2021. 110p. Univ. of Pittsburgh, paper, $17 (9780822966562). 811.

Biologically, food becomes us. Ingredients like family traditions also combine and create a life. All are present in Su's impressive and intensely felt poetry collection, in which she reflects on growing up as a child of Chinese parents who moved to Atlanta, Georgia, in the 1970s. Su devotes much attention to dishes absent or renamed to accommodate a life far from their culture of origin. "Substitutions" is a grocery list of American substitutions for Chinese experiences and food items neatly expressed in two-line stanzas: "Lawn-mower buzzing, for bicycle bells. / Cod fillets, for carp head-to-tail." Su's mastery of form is on display in "The Lazy Susan," in which the same lines are uttered internally by adults in one room and children in another. The culture shock of life in the South is also given weight in "That Almond Dessert," as Su describes the implicit sadness of never making a traditional dish for public events or picnicking under the world's largest Confederate monument in "Personal History." Chinese cuisine is not only about taste but also about creating a fully sensuous experience. In Su's poems, textures and tang speak to all who crave bittersweet nostalgia.--Michael Ruzicka

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 American Library Association
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Ruzicka, Michael. "Peach State." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 13, 1 Mar. 2021, p. 13. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A655228967/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8b6eee30. Accessed 26 June 2024.

Sanctuary ADRIENNE SU. Manic D (Consortium, dist.), $13.95 paper (64p) ISBN 1-933149-06-X

Su's debut gained her attention as a poet of Chinese-American identity; keeping one eye on her heritage, this clear, even conversational sophomore effort has an altogether wider scope. The strongest poems consider her recent pregnancy and motherhood. "In the Maternity Shop" complains that such stores infantilize their customers: "Just when we feel least like ourselves,/our selves are remade in the image/of fourth graders, as if what we did to get here/took place in immaculate ignorance." Poems about domestic troubles place Su in a line of frustrated, and yet loving, parents: "Everyone's mother could have been someone." Other poems deal with broad themes, such as the problems a contemporary woman might incur searching the English literary canon for useful wisdom: "it's not," she says, "that it gives no instructions for shopping or cooking." Su (Middle Kingdom, 1997) rhymes with ease, never detracting from the accessibility she seeks. "Subway riders" rhymes with "Ann Landers," "Evian" with "Puritan"; even Su's sestina sounds gentle and rueful (not virtuosic or forced). New moms in their twenties and thirties, along with fans of accessible poets like Jane Shore or Billy Collins, seeking poems for and about their own lives are likely to find them here. (June)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 PWxyz, LLC
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"Sanctuary." Publishers Weekly, vol. 253, no. 18, 1 May 2006, pp. 38+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A145528305/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9e1b65cc. Accessed 26 June 2024.

"Su, Adrienne: HOT, SOUR, SALTY, SWEET." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A795674034/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=994973f4. Accessed 26 June 2024. Ruzicka, Michael. "Peach State." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 13, 1 Mar. 2021, p. 13. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A655228967/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8b6eee30. Accessed 26 June 2024. "Sanctuary." Publishers Weekly, vol. 253, no. 18, 1 May 2006, pp. 38+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A145528305/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9e1b65cc. Accessed 26 June 2024.

• Asian American Writers’ Workshop website
  https://aaww.org/southern-poetics-adrienne-su-peach-state/
  Word count: 2547

  Southern Poetics in Adrienne Su’s Peach State
  It is so difficult to live as exposition. This is the strain Su acknowledges, the weight of one’s own footnote.

  By Asa Drake
  Devyn Mañibo
  ESSAYS | ADRIENNE SU, GEORGIA, THE SOUTH, FOOD, IMMIGRANTS
  MARCH 15, 2022
  FacebookTwitterEmail
  Idon’t know how to talk about the South without division. The term “Southerner”’ is too broad to explore the lives of Southerners, so I cordon off my own family and establish another South. It is this South that Adrienne Su’s collection of poems, Peach State, addresses—this concentric South and dual identity for Asian Americans. Ours are invisible histories and a conspicuous existence.

  As Imani Perry observes, there are “many Souths,” in which the “[s]tates have identities despite the arbitrariness of their borders,” and this distinctiveness is what we ultimately claim as Southern identity. I first heard Perry discuss the existence of many Souths during Library Journal’s Day of Dialogue in September 2021. I work as a public services librarian in Central Florida, and I was at the end of a summer filled with high-tension and even xenophobic interactions with the public. Perry’s “many Souths”’ became a mantra for me, something which offered solace, that “if we’re going to figure out this country, [the South] is where we’re going to do it” because ultimately the South juxtaposes the costs of assimilating and not assimilating these concentric versions of itself. It’s at this juncture that Adrienne Su addresses her readers.

  Although Su’s Peach State (2021) draws from her experiences growing up in Georgia in the ’70s and ’80s, her account feels evergreen, and captures a rare portrait of the South I know, offering such a full portion, proud of its productive effort, and intimately defined. It’s this intimacy which matters most, how it addresses a collective who so often remains invisible in their geography, those of us:

  who grew up to confuse work with pleasure,
  to become typical immigrants’ children,
  taller than their parents and unaware of hunger
  except when asked the odd, perplexing question.

  Here is the South where the families I grew up with traded calamansi, gumamela, sampaguita, saging, and pandan, a cottage industry of homemaking straight from the garden. We did this as part of a larger history of occupation and diaspora, and yet any attempt to explain this to a classmate seemed laughable. The way, when I talked about Tagalog, I was asked why I cared so much about a Girl Scout cookie. Yet as soon as I entered kindergarten, I was asked to identify the Philippines on the globe. “A native with access to handwritten / recipes, crabapple blossoms, / and leafy driveways” is still the subject of interrogation. So to whom do we write? Or rather, whom do we preserve by writing?

  It is so difficult to live as exposition. This is the strain Su acknowledges in Peach State, the weight of one’s own footnote. “They might not look it up,” she tells us in “Peaches,” it being the facts that offer her origin and belonging, being both “from the Peach State” and “The homeland of the peach.” While Su’s speaker considers how she’d “like to reply” to “to those who ask ‘But where are you from originally,’” she says nothing. It’s a grounding technique she revisits throughout the collection. When confronted with othering language, Su directs the reader towards familial address and internal dialogue, an inclusive “we” which, here, brings the admission that “the reason we bought so much / did have to do with being Chinese—at least / Chinese in that part of America.” She reserves exposition for an audience who might understand that “A crate of peaches straight from the farm / has to be maintained, or eaten in days. / Obviously.” Generously populated, nearly every line in “Peaches” ends in a noun collected into the crate of peaches, the plenty of them, the abundance of things, beckoning to a “you” who “bothered to drive / to the source.”

  The familial address becomes a rhetorical strategy that recenters the speaker’s narrative and prevents an assailant from taking up the scope of the poem. In the poem “Long-Term Care,” the slur “‘Go home!’” from a passing truck becomes an echo of a father’s question to his wife (“Are you going to go back to China?”) and it is the catalyst for the speaker’s own question: “what kind of person thinks she can just walk out, / unable to lie to protect her father.” Within the poem, the speaker’s language regarding home is absolute. Home and parental origin are not interchangeable, except by a total stranger.

  In a collection titled to reflect origin, Su situates state borders—the borders of Chinese diaspora and Southern statehood—within the speaker’s state of being. If belonging has a border, Su steers us away from the periphery to more closely examine the meaning of home.

  I want to share one poem with you in its entirety. It’s titled “Not Your Grandmother’s Sunday Dinner”:

  My grandmother’s
  Sunday dinner.

  I return to this reframing again and again. In part because it is so difficult as someone who identifies as Asian in America to center a narrative on the familial archetype, with the understanding that my family might be the archetype.

  We live in a country, in an era, where a sizable number of our neighbors doubt facts, where populist rhetoric may overwrite expert consensus . There is no proof for belonging. As Christine Kitano summarizes in her essay on Asian American poetry, “There is no elementary point of origin, rather, a brief overview of Asian American poetry’s many earlier manifestations does reveal it has always been rooted in contradiction and struggle, the tension between who belongs and who does not.” But poetry is a generative practice. As Aimee Nezukumatathil, another Southern writer, emphasizes with her students through “low stakes” exercises, “Some days you may not make with words. And that is just fine. The writing will always come. Sometimes you might need to make other things so the writing can come.” Craft demands moving beyond definition-through-opposition, in part, because opposition doesn’t offer definition. Su offers a different objective: writing which preserves our humanity, an invitation to be generous and to create an index of that fullness.

  In Peach State, Su risks exposition, restructuring the language of the observer so that Sunday dinner might be equated with the familial. She risks taking the center, even “in that part of America” where the grocery store demands adaptation, substituting “Balsamic, for Zhenjiang vinegar. / Letters, for the family gathered.” These lines from Su’s poem, “Ginger,” underscore the nuance of Asian American presence and visibility. The lack of imported food doesn’t prevent dinner, but one imported food being stocked and not another emphasizes how footnotes in America’s unequal immigration history have ostracized even aromatics from the pantry. Perhaps garlic has become a pantry staple after once being “barbaric” but ginger has yet to be recognized as essential. Though we now see ginger headlining recipes:

  We’ll affirm its arrival
  when it’s not in the titles
  of recipes in which it figures
  quietly, as moderate slivers

  At a reading with Midtown Scholar Bookstore, Su explains that she wrote Peach State after leaving Georgia. In interviews, Su notes that the collection was spurred in part by her many visits with family in Atlanta where she found a growing and visible population of Asian American businesses and customers, as opposed to the alcoves of families dispersed across the city during her childhood. Her work was aided with extensive research citing 1970s cookbooks by Chinese American writers who knew that not all ingredients would be accessible to their readers, yet Su’s research stretching back fifty years still reflects the experience of Southern families today sourcing ingredients for Asian dishes. Like the immigrant gardens of my childhood that allowed my nanay to trade calamansi for fresh pandan, Su’s collection describes a generation adapting and maintaining culinary traditions alongside the efforts of other communities in diasporas, utilizing replacement ingredients and visiting scattered markets when food was “[u]navailable to us in the early years, when populating a dim-sum house would have required every Chinese person in Atlanta to show up on both days of every weekend.” Su shows the simultaneous pushes towards and against assimilation as a generations-long negotiation of identity. These are poems where a speaker brings tea eggs to the potluck but shys away from pronouncing “Haixian sauce, said in both languages or neither.”

  Su portrays the South as a place of reinvention, a starting point and a final home, which opens a more complex question about families in diaspora. Who doesn’t want to know who (and what) was left behind? When we discuss adaptation, we acknowledge a departure, but from what?

  This week, my cousin posted on Instagram that she is returning to Manila from Zambales. Here is my cousin’s beautiful list:

  Without notice, we lose power. Fresh fruits are hard to come by, but we have the ocean and fresh-caught fish. We order Jollibee when I’m lazy.

  Our days are hot but our nights are colder than AC maxed out.

  My cousin shares a picture of her abundant wrecked field which grows nothing specific. Take part. Take part. I want to invite myself into an obvious lineage and compare this garden to my garden, each of us taught by the same grandparents not to show our teeth when we plant corn or how to keep a tomato from bolting.

  This winter, I drove to every grocery store within forty-five minutes of my home for Mochiko glutinous rice flour, a popular brand of rice flour produced in the United States by Koda Farms. I found multiple brands of coconut flour, gluten-free flour, barley flour, many variations of “cup-for-cup,” and yet when I asked about rice flour, I was referred to Amazon. As if my desire was not too niche, but was too foreign to stock. Under the shadow of Stone Mountain Park, Su’s speaker states, “it’s normal for immigrants / not to see themselves in landmarks,” to explain how “Nothing at Stone Mountain Park / echoed my ancestry” and yet, this speaker is not an immigrant. At what point do we become American? I would even settle, at this point, for Asian American, to have my “foot in the door,” so to speak. In 1996, Lisa Lowe wrote that “the American of Asian descent remains the symbolic ‘alien’, the metonym for Asia who by definition cannot be imagined as sharing in America.” It has been more than a quarter century since this sentence was published.

  I ended up steaming sweet rice and pounding it in a Kitchen Aid. I grew adzuki beans and ube in my own garden, proof that my cravings could be satisfied here, where I live.

  Peach State captures the experiences of Chinese American families in the ’70s and ’80s in order to offer context for third, fourth, fifth generations that are shaping a different South. It is a text about heritage, tradition, and adaptation. It is a collection of cravings and desires, collated in the fashion of a cookbook, which is to say, these flavors go together. Crave peaches or ginger or tea eggs or Krispy Kreme, yes Krispy Kreme, too. Referring to the popular Southern doughnut chain, Su explains that for the next generation, too, “it matters / that they learn this is part of their heritage.” Heritage is a threatening word in the South. It is a word used to tell me that the symbology of death threats is essential to my neighbors. It is a word used to interrogate my parentage. It is a red flag when I read a business listing. And yet heritage, at the root, is an act of transmission, from one generation to the next. Heritage is what we choose to carry, a self identification. After all, I, too, am here by self-selection. I returned to the South more Southern than when I left because at some point I decided to claim it. When describing why her father settled in the South, the speaker says:

  He liked the optimism
  of those around him, who seemed

  not to have eaten bitter, as the idiom
  goes, even though some of them

  had.

  Su’s is a Southern poetics which recognizes hardship and still gives us sugar, a transmission from all the generations who affirm, “their history exists” for us to build upon. Asian American experiences in the South do not start with this generation, nor do they end with it.

  A little small town history: in 2021 I became the first Asian American librarian in my senior position within my library system. Although there is really very little documentation to make such a claim (what we have to compare with is simply the absence of documentation), we celebrated in the Fil-Am newsletter. I brought bilo bilo to the holiday party. I thought about my little dot on political scientist Claire Kim’s formative graft, as if I had taken up Kim’s Field of Racial Positions in Radical Triangulation as a conquerable equation where I might jot down a little history to demonstrate Asian America within America. History is often a list of exceptionalisms, the very definition of racial valorization. The problem with any attempt to “win” on such a field is that any reprieve from racial inequities requires solidarity. As Ina Cariño, another Southern poet, recently stated on social media “if your ideologies are already skewed to harm & racism toward Asians, it’s likely that you’re racist in general.” Focusing on anti-Asian institutions and belief systems alone “ignores the ubiquitous anti-Blackness permeating America.”

  When considering Su’s focus on a family unit and the speaker’s internal dialogue, I cannot help but wonder if her scope is influenced by the South’s history of anti-Blackness, which continues to promote the isolation of marginalized groups. Even so, Su’s poems offer helpful antithesis to valorization by charting the interior, a history of desires, appetites, and longing:

  for forms that live in obscurity
  most of the year, assembled in albums
  my grandfather made—thousands

  I love how the reader must linger on the plenty of that line break—the “thousands” of dishes “immortalized, glistening / on platters, one eye admiring the chandelier, / one side adorned with scallions and ginger.” In this small space, Su offers a retrospective not of successes or valorization but of the celebrations themselves. What the record ultimately shows is the intimate gathering. These celebrations are the point of the documentation, a methodology that transforms history into a catalog of endless replenishment, one dish after another to suggest that the South will sustain this heritage, too.

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