Inherited Distance

What do we inherit from the people who came before us-and what happens when we can no longer fully understand the language in which that inheritance was given?

In Inherited Distance, poet and artist Ruisi He explores the spaces between generations, cultures, languages, bodies, memories, and selves. Across thirty poems, family history meets contemporary adolescence and young adulthood: ancestors emerge through fragments of memory; Chinese words carry meanings that English cannot quite contain; home becomes both inheritance and question; and ordinary experiences of school, friendship, love, art, technology, grief, and growing up acquire unexpected emotional weight.

He's poetry moves freely between tenderness and irreverence, lyric intensity and conversational humor. Scientific imagery, digital culture, family rituals, food, classrooms, hospitals, mythology, and the language of everyday life coexist within a voice that is simultaneously searching and self-aware.

Some poems look backward, toward grandparents and ancestral memory. Others inhabit the immediate pressures and absurdities of contemporary youth. Together they ask what it means to belong to a family, a culture, a generation-and even to one's own body.

The visual dimension of the collection deepens this exploration: original artwork appears alongside the poetry, extending its emotional and imaginative vocabulary beyond words.

Inherited Distance is ultimately a collection about connection: the connections we inherit, the ones we lose, and the ones we attempt to create across the distances between people.

Ruisi He is a poet, artist, and student of culture. Fascinated by the stories people tell and the communities they create, she writes about belonging, memory, identity, and human connection. Her work draws from family history, online communities, fandom culture, contemporary life, and the spaces between languages, generations, and worlds.Born and raised in the United States and later moved to Shanghai, Ruisi is interested in how narratives travel across cultures and how people find one another through shared stories. When she is not writing, she can often be found reading, researching digital cultures, creating art, or debating with students from around the world.