Goodbye Eurydice by Wisteria Deng

What joy, what good fortune, to have Wisteria Deng’s Goodbye Eurydice help us survive this dark epoch. Deng’s lyrical and unflinching poems illuminate the precariousness of our moment: “Times collapse”; “the last peach” rots; “a trembling hand snatches away another piece of wood.” They acknowledge the limits of our resources, both material and imaginative. (“Who is there to teach me about dying / The world is filled with people / who have never died.”) I love this book—love its figures and flourishes, its nerve and verve. I’m glad to live in its world—a world where we may borrow, from the gods, “a square of light.”

—Cody Walker, Director of Creative Writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor

The inventive and tender poems of Goodbye Eurydice are suffused with ecstatic ache, the taste of a perfect peach breaking open in your mouth the day before the apocalypse; as heavy as the scent of dying lilies. Time–“a clown juggling clocks”–is the enemy here: the wound, the instrument opening the wound that gashes between the speaker and their beloveds, an indelible stain, a “sour dream.” But in the backwards glance of Wisteria Deng, it is also a “thin cloth dissolving away,” a conclusion held at bay. The poems wrench loss into a circle of summer to “echo, echo all over / again.” Orpheus would be proud.

–Sam Cha, author of THE YELLOW BOOK

In Goodbye Eurydice, Wisteria Deng traverses continent & country, cosmos & sea, root & ash. With extraordinary imagination & distinctive voice, the poet makes us feel as though we are travelers on an epic journey of what it means to be both human & magical creature or wild animal, that we are both lost & found–migrating bird or a little yellow star floated in the wild sea. And isn’t this why we read poetry–to find ourselves & to lose ourselves again & again?

–Joan Kwon Glass, author of DAUGHTER OF THREE GONE KINGDOMS