Poetry and Books: Sunday Salon

The Best American Poetry 2025 is a landmark edition that not only showcases the finest contemporary American poetry but also honors David Lehman’s achievement as the anthology’s founding editor. 

Familial Hungers: Poems by Christine Wu

Description

Poems that reckon with identity, race, and fractured relationships through the lens of food.

Bittersweet, numbingly spicy, herbal and milky, Familial Hungers is a lyric feast. Ginger scallion fish, Sichuan peppercorns, ginseng tea, Chinese school and white chefs - the reader's appetite is satiated with these poems' complex palate. 

There are the bubbling expectations for immigrant daughters, the chewy strands of colonial critique, and dissolving crystals of language loss. Wu relentlessly searches the grocery shelves for the hard-to-digest ingredients of identity and belonging, offering us her nourishing honesty and courage pulled from the marrow.

In 2023, she was the winner of the RBC PEN Canada New Voices Award

The Master Jeweler by Weina Dai Randel, June 24, 2025; Lake Union Publishing, NetGalley

Genre: historical fiction, Shanghai, WWII

Review: 

Captivating story of a 15 year old girl, Anyu, who leaves home in the north of China for the glittering world of Shanghai, where she learns the art of jewelry making from a family of Jewish artisans. She becomes a master jeweler with her designs and artwork and rewards the family by making their name famous in the city. The detailed descriptions of the work that went into making fine necklaces, rings, tiaras, bracelets and more using basic materials from scratch make the novel particularly interesting. 

The plot itself of a young girl who is trained to become a top artisan in her field is intriguing. The somewhat sad ending as China is invaded by the Japanese pre-WWII makes the story realistic and puts in historical context. The descriptions of Faberge eggs designed for the tsars in pre revolutionary Russia is detailed, as is Anyu's efforts to reproduce the intricacy of the jeweled eggs for her own work.

Informative and well written, an enjoyable novel of historical fiction.

Audiobooks on my list

  

Transplants

by Daniel Tam-Claiborne

A novel following two young women in pursuit of kinship and self-discovery.

On a university campus in rural Qixian, Lin and Liz make an improbable pair: Lin, a retiring Chinese student, and Liz, a Chinese American teacher grieving her mother’s sudden death. They each meet with hostility on campus for several reasons and forge a friendship.

They then swap places. Lin goes to Liz's Ohio hometown, and Liz searches for answers in China re what drove her parents to leave China before she was born. 

Transplants is a story of migration, belonging, and the parts of ourselves that get lost in translation. Alternating between Liz and Lin’s perspectives, it is an exploration of race, love, power, and freedom that illuminates the limits and possibilities of what can happen when we open ourselves to the unknown.

What are you reading, watching, or listening to this week? 

Memes:  The Sunday Post, It's Monday: What Are You Reading, Sunday Salon, and Stacking the Shelves, Mailbox Monday, Book Blogger Hop