ESTHER LIN
REVIEWS & PREVIEWS
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“Lin’s shaping of that arc . . . as she meditates in particular on the underworld or twilight realm of the so-called ‘undocumented,’ reveals a first-book writer already possessed of the graceful touch of the master, a writer skilled in the kind of elision and understatement that—as in the work of Marie Howe and Ellen Bryant Voigt, and [Eavan] Boland—allow the narrative structure itself to show with distinct definition, absent overwriting.”
“My Poem with This Wailing in the Background,” Los Angeles Review of Books, Christopher Kempf
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“These stunning poems breathe new life into the confessional form.”
Publishers Weekly, starred review
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“This is a refreshing debut, one that reasserts a place for the nuances of control in a contemporary poetry landscape that too often privileges its opposite: the ecstatic, the wild, the righteous.”
“‘But Something Stayed with Us’: On the Spare,” West Branch,
Corey Van Landingham
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ESTHER LIN
Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. She is the author of Cold Thief Place, winner of the 2023 Alice James Award, The Ghost Wife, winner of the 2017 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship, and she is the co-editor of Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora (HarperCollins 2024). Her poem “French Sentence” was selected for the 2024 Pushcart Prize, and “Cholera Is What My Grandfather Did During the War” was awarded the Crab Orchard Review’s 2018 Richard Peterson Poetry Prize. Her poem “Habit” is included in Best New Poets 2022, as is “Season of Cherries” in 2023’s Best of the Net Anthology. She was a 2019–20 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown; a 2017–19 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Currently she is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University, and she co-organizes the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers that they face in the literary community.
To read interviews with Esther Lin and the Undocupoets, click here and here.
