Go Home!

In the introduction, editor Buchanan points to the xenophobic political rhetoric of recent years as motivation for this anthology of Asian-American writers who “complicate and expand the idea of home.” Contributors include Alexander Chee, Kimiko Hahn, Chang-Rae Lee, Wo Chan, and Muhammad Amirul bin Muhamad. The fiction writers and poets largely do better with the prompt than the nonfiction writers, whose work can be either didactic or sentimental. Standouts include Alice Sola Kim’s story “Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying,” about three Korean adoptee girls who summon a mother through a spell, and Chaya Babu’s “Cul-de-Sac,” a sprawling essay that expertly weaves together landscape, class, and race to explain the context for the author’s girlhood. Marilyn Chin’s poem “For Mitsuye Yamada on Her 90th Birthday,” is an ecstatic romp through decades of cultural and political history, including lines like “I binged on duck noodles on Clement Street after sucking down a bong/ Wrote ten-thousand letters for Amnesty International high on shrooms.” This powerful collection will push readers to do as Buchanan recommends in her introduction: to seek out the “ever-increasing ways in which we can be homed and un-homed.” (Mar.)