Peach State has its origins in Atlanta, Georgia, the author’s hometown and an emblematic city of the New South, a name that reflects the American region’s invigoration in recent decades by immigration and a spirit of reinvention. Focused mainly on food and cooking, these poems explore the city’s transformation from the mid-twentieth century to today, as seen and shaped by Chinese Americans. The poems are set in restaurants, home kitchens, grocery stores, and the houses of friends and neighbors. Often employing forms—sonnet, villanelle, sestina, palindrome, ghazal, rhymed stanzas—they also mirror the constant negotiation with tradition that marks both immigrant and Southern experience.

Excerpt from “You’re from the South?”

As if it had never joined the Union.
As if we had to go through Customs

when bringing Vidalia onions
to uncles and cousins

in the North, where Confucians
and their brethren flock for education.

As if our speech required translation
or at least interpretation.

As if Hartsfield-Jackson
were a plantation,

the Amtrak Crescent
a moon over rows of cotton,

and all of us a population
that never saw snow or migration.

Adrienne Su is the author of Living Quarters, Having None of It, Sanctuary, and Middle Kingdom. Her poems appear in many anthologies, including four volumes of Best American Poetry. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she is professor of creative writing and poet-in-residence at Dickinson College.

MORE PRAISE

Adrienne Su is one of our best and most readable poets. In her latest book, she offers a rich array of cultural signifiers. With roots in China, but from the American South, she writes with complicated love and wry humor about the fusion of language, food, and family. Elegant, lucid, formally inventive, Peach State is a feast.

Mark Jarman, author of The Heronry and Dailiness

Food is the meeting point between cultures, between generations, between histories, and in Adrienne Su’s Peach State, food is also resistance and survival. In her engaging new collection of poems, Adrienne Su charts the ways that her Chinese American family adapts—and changes—White, Southern culture for its own uses. Su specifically considers how both race and class are powerfully woven into the presentation of the foods we long for and eat, from the names of “exotic” fruits to how “disposable” cuisine hints at how we portray the cultures producing our nation’s take-out. Peach State is sly, smart and accessible, formally sophisticated and moving. It’s a beautiful, and thought-provoking meditation on food, race, and identity.

Paisley Rekdal