Paper Money - by Winshen Liu (Paperback)

About the Book

Winshen Liu's Paper Money is a sensory and sparse exploration of grief and the complexity of the second-generation Taiwanese immigrant experience in America.

Book Synopsis

Winshen Liu's Paper Money is a sensory and sparse exploration of grief and the complexity of the second-generation Taiwanese immigrant experience in America.

"These poems awaken our own yearning for the universe of the senses that Liu renders with an exquisitely refined depth of observation."

- Diane Seuss,

author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry

This book is an exploration of language, particularly the intersection of languages that is a part of having a foot in two countries (in this case, Taiwan and the US). Liu includes Chinese characters and words that will add a layer for both English and bi-lingual readers.

Many poems are full of sensory images, particularly foodways and customs, that draw the reader into the world of the poems. Food is deeply connected to memory and community and is a powerful symbol throughout.

This collection is ultimately about grief, both elegy for the death of the speaker's grandfather, and an exploration of the loss and longing one feels for home.

The motif of money draws up the important theme of poverty and the "American Dream."

Paper Money is for lovers of tight, image-heavy verse, and those interested in learning more about the Taiwanese immigrant experience in America from a fresh new voice.

Review Quotes

"Winshen Liu's Paper Money begins with 'Conjugation, ' a poem that inventively enacts the slipperiness of language, especially for those immigrants who must negotiate a relationship with a new tongue, and therefore a new system of meaning. 'Catch // the rise before it falls to rose, lilac / to lily, orchid to orchard. Tell me / where we missed: strike // one, strike two, the clock strikes / twelve, the mouse runs down, and you're out / now sick, stricken, stroke.' It is a destabilizing and exhilarating ride. Other poems echo a legacy of poverty and ingenuity, in equal measure. It is food that provides the fundamental bond to family and cultural memory, in which Taiwan arrives in the steam of jasmine rice, a fig in the 'fancy food store' gives birth to yearning and to rhyme, and the 'nectared geyser' of white peaches becomes the nexus of elegiac pleasure. These poems awaken our own yearning for the universe of the senses that Liu renders with an exquisitely refined depth of observation. Tadpoles in a stream are 'jellied rain.' The throats of frogs are 'engorged / with the unsaid.' As the sensuous present tense meets up with the eternity of the dead, the ashes of the body become 'front teeth and fresh / paint, magician's wave and cuff links.' The impact of the whole is one in which the elegance of craft provides compressed containers for histories and feelings that would otherwise be unmanageable in their immensity, a treasure in paper money always on the verge of going up in smoke."

- Diane Seuss,

author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry

"Winshen Liu's poems examine peaches for ripeness and, with the magic only the best writers can conjure, finds a way to measure our own grief, hunger, poverty, and desire. These poems are a balm for anyone with an achy heart or an empty wallet. Winshen Liu is a staggering writer."

- José Olivarez,

author of Promises of Gold

"Elegant while elegiac, delicate and brimming with delicacies of image, Winshen Liu's Paper Money refuses to brittle where the feeling heart is most tempted to break. Every detail is precise like the arrangement of flowers, is considerate, is resonant with reverence and the aches of understanding. This work adeptly reveals the distances even love cannot completely close by trying to travel the distances only love can see. If money burns a hole in your pocket, spend it on this; send a poem up the sky to someone who needs a reminder that they're remembered, still."

- Cortney Lamar Charleston,

author of Doppelgangbanger

"Despite their weighty subjects-poverty, migration and its attendant losses, familial love, grief-the poems in Paper Money feel mobile and vibrant as butterflies, set aloft by the freshness of Liu's voice and the light touch of her lines. The playful charm and delicate textures of these poems belie a profound depth of feeling, like handmade lace draped over an insistent, pulsing heart."

- Melissa Ginsburg,

author of Dear Weather Ghost and Doll Apollo