A lice Turski’s surefooted debut hardly feels like a first book. Imbued with rich imagery, animated with subtle musicality, and saturated with quiet confidence, these poems will invite and excite readers to follow their startling leaps. Set in contemporary North America, this collection explores translation, nature, culture, matrilineage, marriage, and parenthood, often addressing Asian American and immigrant experiences. The poems range from unsettling pseudo-pastorals exploring the entanglement of life and decay, to ironic retorts against orientalist tropes of serving blond boyfriends bone-broth congee with “our slipperiest chopsticks.”

Turski’s lyrical voice is remarkably restrained. This is not to say the poems are cold, but rather that their tenderness is conveyed through depth of attention rather than overflow of language. Fans of Louise Glück and Victoria Chang will appreciate this skillful modulation. Rather than linguistic pyrotechnics, this collection’s innovation lies in Turski’s capacity to gaze clear-eyed at the strangeness of everyday life: the speaker receives a call from a woman accusing them of being “the god of parasites”; a rat falls from the sky; the speaker’s grandmother teaches them how to steal plums in exchange for help studying for an immigration test.

Turski’s exploration of the emotional and political weight of language is especially powerful:

There were words my mother
never taught me

juniper
hamlet
stucco
junco

[…]

Here is some of the bitterness
without which we had lived

I was also particularly compelled by the collection’s most daring poem, “Looking for Jade Rabbit,” in which the speaker imagines “reach[ing] inside your skull / and strok[ing]         a special spot” to numinous effect. This surreal concept allows Turski’s visceral imagery and steady voice to shine. As “bone        open[s] up to its sapwood,” the speaker calmly intones, “what should I do       with your God / tell me / God / is the breeze      bothering you.”

Turski’s poems lick the lead off paintings, gaze upon the “plains of horns” of lychees, and pulse like a “eusocial tide” of ants. Coruscating with pearls and worms, this deft, uncanny book announces a poet keenly attuned to a “world / holding tight to the roots / of its blades.” mRb