PoetryMagazine.com Editor's Featured Poet Adrienne Su

Adrienne Su
USA

Adrienne Su is the author of two books of poems, Middle Kingdom (Alice James Books, 1997) and Sanctuary (Manic D Press, 2006). Her poems appear in anthologies including The New American Poets, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, Literature and Its Writers, The Pushcart Prize XXIV, Best American Poetry 2000, Poetry Daily, and Poetry 30, and personal essays with a culinary bent have appeared in magazines including Prairie Schooner and Saveur. Su has been a resident poet at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA; Dartmouth College; Yaddo; The MacDowell Colony; The Virginia Center for Creative Arts; and The Frost Place, Robert Frost’s house in Franconia, NH. With the support of a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she is completing her third collection, Having None of It. A native of Atlanta, Su now lives in Carlisle, PA, where she teaches English and creative writing and is poet-in-residence. Her website is: http://users.dickinson.edu/~sua/

Woman under a Roof

I’ve long resisted the roof
in my Chinese name, An,
for peaceful, tranquil, safe.

Vying with men as if I were
a peer, I flirted with the language
but considered it backward

like the PRC: live chickens hung
by the feet, spies in the courtyard,
fatal gossip, justice for none.

And if names determine lives,
I must have gone to Harvard
to be a more exciting wife;

if I held fast to the liberty
my diligence had bought,
if I claimed my body

was not the map of my future,
if I dared leave my children
under another’s roof, there’d be war.

So this is it, in middle America.
Most days, it feels the same as peace.
Most days are dull, without trauma,

and every autumn, girls still splendid
in denim and strawberry lip gloss,
smart as foxes and nearly as quick,

claim to hold sacred the task
of nourishment, claim to be creatures
that must be supported, just as a calf

whose flesh will sate the hunger
of the men who raise it is supported:
tenderly, so the results will be tender.

Reprinted from Sanctuary (Manic D Press, San Francisco, 2006) with permission from author and publisher (www.manicdpress.com). First published in Eclipse.

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