Description

University of Massachusetts Press, paperback

Publication Date: April 1, 2024

Publisher Marketing: Crafted with lines from her late father’s letters, Jennifer Tseng’s Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive is a portrait of an immigrant, a rootless person whose unspoken loss–that of his native geography, family, traditions, language–underlies every word. Though her father’s first language was Mandarin, for more than twenty years he wrote these letters in English, in theory so that she could understand them. His sentences are riddled with errors, some nearly unintelligible. Lines from his letters appear as titles and are scattered throughout the poems, blending voices of father and daughter. This collection enacts what it means to lose someone and commune with them simultaneously–the paradox of grief and all it gives us.