Return Flight

By Jennifer Huang

Selected by Jos Charles as the winner of the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Return Flight is a lush reckoning: with inheritance, with body, with trauma, with desire—and with the many tendons in between.

When Return Flight asks “what name / do you crown yourself,” Huang answers with many. Textured with mountains—a folkloric goddess-prison, Yushan, mother, men, self—and peppered with shapeshifting creatures, spirits, and gods, the landscape of Jennifer Huang’s poems is at once mystical and fleshy, a “myth a mess of myself.” Sensuously, Huang depicts each of these not as things to claim but as topographies to behold and hold.

Here, too, is another kind of mythology. Set to the music of “beating hearts / through objects passed down,” the poems travel through generations—among Taiwan, China, and America—cataloging familial wounds and beloved stories. A grandfather’s smile shining through rain, baby bok choy in a child’s bowl, a slap felt decades later—the result is a map of a present-day life, reflected through the past.

Return Flight is a thrumming debut that teaches us how history harrows and heals, often with the same hand; how touch can mean “purple” and “blue” as much as it means intimacy; and how one might find a path toward joy not by leaving the past in the past, but by “[keeping a] hand on these memories, / to feel them to their ends.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Release date: Jan 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781571317179

Jennifer Huang

Jennifer Huang was born in Maryland to Taiwanese immigrants and has since called many places her home. Their poems have appeared in POETRY, The Rumpus, and Narrative Magazine, among other places; and they have been received recognition from the Academy of American Poets, Brooklyn Poets, North American Taiwan Studies Association, and more. In 2020, Jennifer earned their MFA in poetry at the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers' Program. They live in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

Book preview

RETURN FLIGHT

RETURN FLIGHT

Poems

JENNIFER HUANG

MILKWEED EDITIONS

© 2022, Text by Jennifer Huang

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.

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milkweed.org

Published 2022 by Milkweed Editions

Printed in Canada

Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker

Cover art by María Medem

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First Edition

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Huang, Jennifer, author.

Title: Return flight : poems / Jennifer Huang.

Description: First edition. | Minneapolis, Minnesota : Milkweed Editions, 2022. | Summary: Selected by Jos Charles as the winner of the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Return Flight is a lush reckoning: with inheritance, with body, with trauma, with desire-and with the many tendons in between-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021037273 (print) | LCCN 2021037274 (ebook) | ISBN 9781571315281 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781571317179 (ebook)

Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

Classification: LCC PS3608.U2248 R48 2022 (print) | LCC PS3608. U2248 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021037273

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021037274

Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Return Flight was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Friesens Corporation.

For family.

And that which is unsaid.

CONTENTS

Neighborhood Walk

~

Departure

Customs

Disaster

Fantasy Self-Erasure

That dawn at the beach

Notes on Orange

Tanka

haiku

Procedure

228

~

Departure

From the Taiwan Cypress in Alishan

Individualism

Disorder

A Visit from Brother Ghost on the Harvest Moon

I fear the baby

poem for giving birth

Among a sea of clouds

Turbulence

Ode to Menstruation

The Creek

Pleasure Practice

~

Layover

~

Departure

After the Storm

song of chou doufu

Self-Pleasure

How to Love a Rock

On Days I Stay with My Father

Relief

Nonconcordant

Tongue-Tied

Drift

Zuihitsu for Yushan

Manifest

Notes

Gratitude

RETURN FLIGHT

Neighborhood Walk

A crop of deer appears. They