Join The Ivy Bookshop as we once again transform our gardens into an event space for poetry, this time celebrating the new collection 回 / RETURN by Emily Lee Luan! Through the recurrence of memory, myth, and grief, 回 / RETURN captures the elusory language of sorrow and solitude that binds Taiwanese diasporic experience.

On May 24, Emily will read from her work alongside poet Samuel Cheney nestled in a corner of The Ivy's outdoor space, and we invite you to join us for this intimate, lovely evening. We encourage (and supply) picnic blankets (though there will also be chairs and benches available), and there will be a pop-up bar. Deep listening and genuine questions encouraged. We love gathering with you to talk about the draw and the impacts of poetry in the world.

Click here to RSVP!

Click here to order 回 / RETURN!

Rooted in the classical tradition of the Chinese “reversible” poem, 回 / Return is engaged in the act of looking back—toward an imagined homeland and a childhood of suburban longing, through migratory passages, departures, and etymologies, and into the various holes and voids that appear in the telling and retelling of history. The poems ask: What is feeling? What is melancholy? Can language translate either?

Emily Lee Luan is the author of 回 / Return (April 2023), a winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and I Watch the Boughs, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. A former Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2021, Best New Poets 2019, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Rutgers University–Newark.

Samuel Cheney is a poet from Centerville, Utah. The winner of a 2021 Pushcart Prize, he is Reginald S. Tickner Writer-in-Residence at Gilman School and Assistant Editor of Smartish Pace. His poems appear in Copper Nickel, Missouri Review, North American Review, Plume, and Salmagundi. Before moving to Baltimore, he worked at Grove Press, Gasser Grunert gallery, and the Criterion Collection.

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