This compelling collection of prose poems charts a woman’s peripatetic journey as she struggles to find home in various lands whose inhabitants question or challenge her arrival. A rewarding excursion into a fierce and
vibrant life!
vibrant life!
Allegiance reads like a photogravure tour of cultural contradictions, fierce adaptations, family loyalties, and personal independence. Gee is a marvelously direct writer of powerful autobiographical vignettes, each one telling in its quiet ferocity for personal revelation, each a momentary, lyric ascent above everyday confusion.
In remarkably few words, Gee captures a life shaped by immigration, geographic distance, and the complexities of family. Allegiance makes its characters knowable and real, and is unafraid to ask them difficult questions.
Gee’s touch is both delicate and muscular while she explores the lives of the people our lives rest upon, the people responsible for who we’ve become. Other Small Histories is poetry with work to do, poetry to feed us, and move us more sanely from day to day.
Perfect for the book-club circuit and beyond.
In this arresting memoir, Gee crafts engrossing and poetic scenes from her life that illuminate struggles with identity and feeling out of place as a Chinese-American woman.
Taut and lyrical … readers will walk away feeling as though they’ve been swimming in an ocean, even though they’ve only felt a few drops of rain.