Good Son

Kyle Liang's full-length poetry collection, Good Son, encapsulates the "American-born Chinese" diaspora in 70 stunning, heart-rending pages. At its core bleeds a life deeply troubled by Western centrism and not-so-casual racism. Liang details both suppression and acceptance through the lens of a speaker born to immigrant parents in a deft collection that refuses to separate identities into boxes. Explorations of informed consent, the rash of anti-Asian hate crimes that followed COVID-19, and the mockery of speech and accents and social issues intertwine with staggering prose in poems about resilience-and love. What the speaker longs for most is for their heart "to be greedy again." In these pages is the embodiment of that fathoms-deep exquisite longing for self.