Congratulations to Winshen for winning the Driftwood Press Adrift Chapbook Contest! A number of the poems from this chapbook were a part of Winshen’s COURAGE to WRITE application. Congratulations on a well-deserved accolade!
From Driftwood Press’ announcement:
We are excited to announce that Winshen Liu’s Paper Money has been chosen by Diane Seuss as this year’s winner of the Adrift Chapbook Contest! Here is a wonderful blurb from Diane about the collection:
”Winshen Liu’s Paper Money begins with ‘Conjugation,’ a poem that inventively enacts the slipperiness of language, especially for those immigrants who must negotiate a relationship with a new tongue, and therefore a new system of meaning. ‘Catch // the rise before it falls to rose, lilac / to lily, orchid to orchard. Tell me / where we missed: strike // one, strike two, the clock strikes / twelve, the mouse runs down, and you’re out / now sick, stricken, stroke.’ It is a destabilizing and exhilarating ride. Other poems echo a legacy of poverty and ingenuity, in equal measure. It is food that provides the fundamental bond to family and cultural memory, in which Taiwan arrives in the steam of jasmine rice, a fig in the ‘fancy food store’ gives birth to yearning and to rhyme, and the ‘nectared geyser’ of white peaches becomes the nexus of elegiac pleasure. These poems awaken our own yearning for the universe of the senses that Liu renders with an exquisitely refined depth of observation. Tadpoles in a stream are ‘jellied rain.’ The throats of frogs are ‘engorged / with the unsaid.’ As the sensuous present tense meets up with the eternity of the dead, the ashes of the body become ‘front teeth and fresh / paint, magician’s wave and cuff links.’ The impact of the whole is one in which the elegance of craft provides compressed containers for histories and feelings that would otherwise be unmanageable in their immensity, a treasure in paper money always on the verge of going up in smoke.”
— Diane Seuss
author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry