ESTHER LIN
BOOKS & EVENTS
COLD THIEF PLACE
Winner of the 2023 Alice James Award
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“The people inhabiting Esther Lin’s poems have been handed a map that details the path to the most splendid home. But the journey might be impossible. Though they travel with care and attention, though they find places to settle along the way, the subjects of Cold Thief Place keep searching for a place where there is comfort and restful love. These heartrending poems are full of grief and struggle, but they hold the spark of all the possibilities available in our most dearly-held dreams. A gorgeous and timely book.”
—Camille T. Dungy, author of Soil: The Story
of a Black Mother’s Garden
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“Esther Lin’s Cold Thief Place is a stunner, filled with poems that are as poignant as they are defiant, as quietly mournful as they are thrillingly untamed. Lin is a major new talent, yet she sings—of family, of love, and of her life as an undocumented American—with all the wisdom and skill of a very old soul. This is a fabulous debut.”
—Patrick Phillips, author of Song of the Closing Doors and Elegy for a Broken Machine
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“Esther Lin’s Cold Thief Place is truly a once-in-a-lifetime revelation. I am changed, I am a better human being after reading these precise and poignant poems. This book is not only a timeless and necessary addition to immigrant literature around the world, but an automatic induction into the American canon.”
—Javier Zamora, author of Unaccompanied and
Solito: A Memoir
HERE TO STAY: POETRY AND PROSE FROM THE UNDOCUMENTED DIASPORA
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From the indomitable writers and activists Janine Joseph, Esther Lin, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo comes an anthology gathering some of the best work from currently and formerly undocumented poets, as well as poets from mixed status families from across the undocumented diaspora in America. Here to Stay is a collection of honest, searing, and evocative poems interspersed with short personal narratives. Deeply intimate, these works explore how to exist in the space between the familiar and the unknown, between the safety of silence and the desire to share. Highlighting the significant insights of undocumented poets, this brilliant compendium challenges misconceptions of what it means to live and write as an undocumented person in modern America.
Beautiful, poignant, and timely, this must-read collection is a rich and essential new chapter in the ongoing story of the eclectic immigrant experience and the United States itself.
