Motherlands: Poems

by Weijia Pan

Overview

Winner of the Levis Reading Prize

Chosen by Louise Glück for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, this engrossing debut interrogates history, identity, and the power of poetry to elucidate both.

Motherlands opens with a child drawn early to poetry. “In summer I write. Two lines at a time, two vying souls / running up the wall.” The collection follows this speaker-poet through a childhood in post-Maoist China and an eventual move to the United States, laying bare cultural and linguistic tensions in both historical and modern settings. He cites Chinese laborers toiling in American factories—an echo of the brutalities endured by those who constructed the Transatlantic Railroad—and speaks to anxieties around belonging, assimilation, and identity. “If I forget one character a day,” he writes. “I will have forgotten Chinese / by the end of 2042.”

In these attentive, imaginative poems, Weijia Pan questions the artist’s duty—his duty—as a chronicler of truth, especially through issues of displacement and global injustice. What can the poet do but observe? And yet, in unpacking ancestral traumas connected to Maoist China and modern-day bigotry exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, he still finds himself turning to art as a way to understand both the self and the world at large. Through elegant juxtapositions, Pan crafts an emotional world that is at once regional and universal—Li Bai and Du Fu sit alongside Glenn Gould and Sviatoslav Richter, pepper used to bless new roads is repurposed in the mace used against protesters, two languages compete on a single tongue. Lyrical and visionary, this collection embodies poetry’s capacity to ground us, teach us, and change us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571317834
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	09/17/2024
Series:	Max Ritvo Poetry Prize
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Weijia Pan is the author of Motherlands, selected by Louise Glück for the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. A poet and translator from Shanghai, China, his poems have appeared in AGNI, Boulevard, Copper Nickel, Georgia Review, New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He is a third-year MFA at the University of Houston, where he is a winner of the Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry.

Weijia Pan is the author of Motherlands, selected by Louise Glück for the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. A poet and translator from Shanghai, China, his poems have appeared in AGNI, Boulevard, Copper Nickel, Georgia Review, New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He is a third-year MFA at the University of Houston, where he is a winner of the Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry.

Read an Excerpt

BEAUTY MASK

 

 

I was hired to design the voices of virtual beings. The first thing my boss taught me was trust must be established immediately between user and bot. This will never happen if the eyelashes are wrong, he insisted as we workshopped Nia’s face—an intelligent avatar we were contracted to create for a teaching proof of concept. The requirements were few: female, racially ambiguous, unique mouth animation for every phoneme, head without a neck preferred. He looked at her, said she was his type. Like all of our avatars, Nia was modeled using The Marquardt Beauty Mask, which utilizes The Golden Ratio to measure universally beautiful facial characteristics. My boss explained that a user’s recognition of beauty is actually nothing more than a recognition of humanness. This doesn’t mean all humans are beautiful. Simply, the more beautiful, the more humane.

SHEEP

 

 

I was moving across the country for a man

and a job. The man

happened first and the job followed

 

which made me lucky.

The girl next to me

rubbed a stick with a roller ball on the end

 

over her inner wrists, top notes of rancid

butter and sugar complimenting

my Sonoma Blend. The flight attendants

 

gave a dramatic reading

of each other’s bio: Mark swore by CrossFit

and Candy’s favorite color was clear.

 

The girl continued applying products,

opening an egg with a mound of mint

lip balm inside, then using her finger

 

to dab it on her eyebrows,

brushing the little hairs upward

with her nails.

 

I was probably around her age

when I first shaved all my body hair

using a whole pack of Schick twins

 

after my friend went with a boy

into the back room of his basement,

where his dad kept the weights.

 

After, he’d given her a nickname,

something to do with wooly mammoths.

A Merino sheep named Shrek

 

was a minor story

in the back of my in-flight magazine.
For years he hid in a cave

 

so he wouldn’t be sheared,

and when he was found was a hero for a day

before he was shaved on live news, enough wool

 

for twenty mens’ suits.

But that’s not where the humiliation ended,

I wanted to lean over and tell the girl,

 

he was shaved again on an iceberg floating

off the coast of New Zealand.

Of course I didn’t say a word to her,

 

just kept drinking my shit wine

as we flew over the white puffs

doing the only thing they can do.

 

DEEP LEARNING

 

 

Fall arrived after a long summer.

We sat on the porch with a friend,

inviting the cold to make our breathing visible.

Our friend asked if we have any memories

that can’t possibly be true.

 

Days after, I tried again to write

the impossible memory

I’ve been trying to write forever

about my mom digging up

the enormous birch in our front yard

with her bare hands.

 

She dragged the tree’s long body

through our starter home, trailing dirt

up the stairs (I can see the dirt

on the cream carpet),

 

then shoved it under their bed,

the roots sticking out from the bottom.

I remember how, after catching

her breath, she said

nothing, wiped her hands

on her cut-offs as if

she’d only just made a sandwich.

 

All these years

I’ve taken this away from her.

 

HUMAN RESOURCES

 

 

I spend all day trying to break a female

 

bot who wants to coach me

 

to be my best self. Time to figure out

 

dinner again, time to plug in

 

my phone for the third time today.

 

On my way to the store my car plays me a voice

 

message from my grandmother. For Christmas,

 

she wants a pet robot she heard about

 

on the radio: a life-sized adult cat

 

that purrs when rubbed in the right places. 

 

She thinks I create these creatures

 

but it’s God who creates them.

 

I hear a clock tick. I listen for the food

 

to tell me it’s time. You ask me if I’m sure

 

after I say I’m okay after you ask me

 

if I’m okay, knowing you said something hurtful.

 

On the kitchen counter, a faded splash of orange

 

where battery acid spilled from our emergency

 

flashlight. I return to it each day with the

 

Magic Eraser. Something about the way

 

the Ferrante translation uses the word suffer.  

 

I want to go back and change my answer.

 

When I lay down, the work day’s still going in my head:

 

and of course you’ll want a female bot that’s what everyone wants

 

the best part is you can change her clothes with the seasons.

 

I dream about the department

 

that women get re-assigned to after they file

 

harassment complaints. I dream this

 

because it happened. Under a drop ceiling

 

each woman has her own fax machine

 

to do her pretend work: messages scribbled

 

on lightweight paper and sent

 

to nowhere. I don’t get to see the words,

 

but know what they say.

 

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

I.

 

INTERIOR LIFE 

BEAUTY MASK  

WORK FROM HOME 

GROCERY SHOPPING  

LISTENING MODE  

CLEANING THE POOL  

FLOWER 

DECISION TREE  

YOGA REVOLUTION 

II.

THE NEW MIDWEST  

EXPOSURE THERAPY  

MOBILE  

TROUBLE AREAS  

HOST  

VACATION DINNER  

ATTRACTION  

ANTICIPATORY DESIGN  

DEAR ABDUCTOR  

REPLICA 

SHEEP 

III.

DEEP LEARNING  

HUMAN RESOURCES  

WELLNESS  

BIOLOGICAL CLOCK 

INTELLIGENT OVEN  

THE VALLEY  

FATIGUE  

HOUSE CALL 

LISTENING MODE  

HERE  

NOTES  

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS  

 

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Motherlands 

“[A] surprising and striking collection.”—Publishers Weekly

“In Motherlands, Weijia Pan recalls the China of the past and the United States of his present—and the vast connections between them, connections that exist as much in deep history as they do in immediate consciousness. In poems at once intricate and expansive, Pan considers the fact of displacement and the vagaries of translation, as re-creation, transformation, betrayal. Here, he finds opportunity in portraiture and music to consider both global injustice and the most delicate nuances of feeling. ‘Time’s time’s timestamp,’ he writes, ‘which means that time keeps its own records.’ And what records these are—imagined in brilliant poems by an essential young poet.”—Kevin Prufer, author of The Fears

“In Weijia Pan’s brilliant first collection, Motherlands, the personal is political—and imaginary. And historical. But also, made entirely from our collective moment in the world. Contemporary environments blend temporally with great thinkers and artists of the past. Pan and his speakers are in a deep and deeply felt conversation with time itself. And Pan captures these complexities in language with so much crackle and verve, so much strange and surprising energy, with such animated stories and interesting information, that I couldn’t put the book down. Motherlands is a singular accomplishment by one of the most dynamic new voices in contemporary poetry.”—Erin Belieu, author of Come-Hither Honeycomb 

“How intimate and personal the vast forces of history—history of country, family, art—become in Motherlands, Weijia Pan’s striking debut. In one poem, Pan tries to leave China a voicemail; in another, he imagines a grandfather home from guerrilla war, being handed a broken bowl. Wit and empathy inform these poems, and a love of music and poetry—as well as a time-taught sense of the precariousness of peace, of a time when ‘an invisible hand’ might grab his shoulders, to say: ‘Are you Weijia? Something’s happened. Come this way.’”—Dana Levin, author of Now Do You Know Where You Are

“From his father’s ‘flip-flops making a broken ragtime on the street’ to playing a Liszt é tude that evokes Stalin marking death warrants with non-photo blue pencils, Weijia Pan writes with verve and transforms the personal into cultural history. Motherlands is a remarkable debut.”—Arthur Sze, author of Sight Lines

From the Publisher