Magnolia: Poems

Probably more of a 3.5.

I'm not a poetry reader at all, so I frankly don't even know the reason why I impulsively decided to pick this up. And I'm definitely not someone who can review a poetry/verse collection like this in any coherent manner.

Why I can't really articulate to you what this whole collection was about, I could feel some of the emotions behind it, especially the ones related to belonging, not being able to understand a language that's supposed to one's mother tongue, that feeling of displacement from the place where one belongs to etc. And the the descriptions of food and rain in particular were very exquisite. But I can't say the same about the complete book because there were many places where I felt lost and unable to understand what the author was trying to convey, but that's probably just my shortcoming for being unfamiliar with the format.

However, the one thing I will remember about this is the way the author plays with the Chinese language, using homonyms as a metaphor for the various emotions the narrator is going through, the wordplay giving so many different meanings than what's being conveyed in English, and the interplay between the two languages leads to so much more conversation and depth. I don't know if I will read more poetry by this author but I definitely feel that I got to experience this collection.