Yearling

“Defiant and uncategorizable, Lo Kwa Mei-en’s Yearling, with its teeming species, battles, and passions, read like an illuminated manuscript: mysterious, visceral, awe-full. Hers are some of the most enviable poems I have ever read, and herald Mei-en as the new standard bearer for innovative structure, terrifying acknowledgment, ecstatic statement, and, I daresay, beauty.”–Kathy Fagan

Lo Kwa Mei-en’s Yearling explores adolescence through a deeply moving and poignantly raw lens. As the speaker ages, so too does the poetry, creating laments for the loss of friendship, the loss of species, and sometimes the loss of humanity itself. Harsh, forlorn and yet effervescent, Mei-en’s lyricism perfectly captures the ethos of youth in an unsure world.

From “Rara Avis Decoy”:

Wild diamond rocking on the floor

of a predatory boat. Point & say sweet traitor
to the wood & water for wanting to be made

of both. My name is I know not what I am
as a country of mothers & fathers comes down.

They call me sleeping beauty. I dream I am

in flight, body unfolding, folding, a bullet

wounding water again & again–the mysterious
love of a father & mother a two-barreled

gaze. The gun in my dream speaks my name

& sees a beating vein. Takes aim–

Lo Kwa Mei-en is from Singapore and Ohio. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Guernica, the Kenyon Review, West Branch, and other journals, and won the Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize and the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize.