Having None of It

In this third collection, award-winning poet Adrienne Su reflects deeply about the circumstances in which people are forced to remake themselves: as parents, as immigrants, as people whose marriages have ended, as people who’ve wound up in a place they never intended to settle.

From “Breakup”:

Another ending finds its place
among novels, lives, summers
that fled, but this kind has a way
of getting filed under failure:

yes, the relationship failed,
if to fail is to fail to endure.

Adrienne Su was born in 1967 and raised in Atlanta. She received her A.B. from Harvard, and an M.F.A. from the University of Virginia. Awards include a Pushcart Prize as well as residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell. Adrienne teaches at Dickinson College. She is the author of Middle Kingdom (Alice James) and Sanctuary (Manic D).