Cold Thief Place

Cold Thief Place speaks of the experiences of an undocumented American, her parents who fled Communist China and found safety in fundamentalist Christianity, and how she tried to understand them and herself by way of confessional poems.

This is a family story. It tells of a mother who fled an authoritarian government and turned that authoritarianism on to her children. Of a father who made a new life—three times on three different continents—and his sea voyage in between. Or what a daughter imagines of these events, as much as it's possible to truly know one's parents. The narrator, who is their daughter, grew up in difficult but very different circumstances, too: undocumented in the United States and was pressured into a green card marriage in order to live a "normal life." One of the myths of America is that Americans are newly formed, defiant of authority, and free from old-world traditions.

This book speaks to dark side of this myth: of the legacies that my parents wished to escape but instead carried with them: their distrust of government and their desire for an authoritarianism similar to the kind they had fled. Individually, the poems attempt to understand the emotions surrounding these impulses, from the point of view of their daughter, who is herself displaced as an undocumented American—that is, a person who is not permitted to be American, and without a home country to return to.

Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. She is also author of The Ghost Wife, winner of the 2017 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship. Most recently, she was an artist-resident at the T. S. Eliot House in Gloucester, MA, and Cité internationale, Paris. She was a 2019–20 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown; a 2017–19 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her work has been featured in 2023's Best of the Net, Best New Poets 2022, and she was winner of the 2018 Crab Orchard Review's Richard Peterson Poetry Prize. Currently, she co-organizes the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers that they face in the literary community.