This second chapbook by Georgia San Li includes vivid imprints, part past, part discovery, some shimmer in both love and lamentation. This poetry explores themes of grief, parent and child, mortality and longing. With no set form, the poems shift from fragments of modern life, to the satirical, and the ethereal.
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The first thing one notices about Periodic Elements, is the predominance of simple, tight forms, with many poems composed of couplets and tercets. The second thing one notices, though, is how unexpectedly these forms are constructed. Form and content push and pull in restless kinesis, giving the sense that meaning is seeking simultaneously to both inhabit and escape from the lines on the page. And this, of course, is what these poems are all about – locations and dislocations, connections and disconnections, the everyday and the abstract, not as discrete experiences, but as the volatile and inseparable admixture of opposites which fuel our lives. Alive with restless contradictions which, viewed as a whole, cohere into precise new shapes on every reading, the third thing one might notice about Periodic Elements is that there are no full stops...
The poems in Georgia San Li's Periodic Elements offer what I most wish for from a poetry collection: a bridge between the senses' observable realism and a more speculative realm of mind and soul. In vibrant sinuous sentences, San Li juggles the intersection of science and literature, from Korean tradition to American pop culture to the broader embrace of global intellectual thought. It's a stunning performance.
A luminous, philosophical exploration of family, identity, and the natural world. Diverse and playful in form, the poems are grounded in fresh, vivid imagery, full of earthly delights. Georgia San Li’s collection takes readers on a journey of both aching nostalgia and momentum questing forward.
The poems in Georgia San Li’s marvelous book reward a reader with their ample, vivid description, and through that description, the poet reveals the greater mosaic of the past. These poems aim to make sense of the past—make meaning from a personal history—and the act of remembering as captured in these rich and alluring poems is the essential work of poetry. Georgia San Li is a poet of great gifts, and Periodic Elements is the proof.
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