Vesuvius at Home by Jennifer Liou

Vesuvius at Home is a book of quiet contemplation on the fragile bonds of family and the waning rites and loyalties that might otherwise secure their persistence. There is throughout a daughter’s grieving over the lack of love between her parents, how filiality to her father’s ways, brought from China, can only be a blank imperative, seemingly canceled by her own American identity. But, poem by poem, what emerges is an atonement for lives imperiled by their own lovelessness. The book is an erotic penance, not for profligacy, but for abstemiousness. The body itself becomes refuge and its appeal to another a renewal of ties and vows to the living. Jenny Liou has raised an eloquent cry that makes of us who hear it a throng of her earthly beloved.
–Garrett Hongo, author of Coral Road —

Negotiating what feels to be a volatile space between declarations and questions, Jenny Liou’s Vesuvius at Home takes a stark look at how the speaker sees herself fitting between how others live together and how she does not or might do the same. In the asking and being easily carried away, at the the center, Liou deftly explores the urge to get beyond “something / less lonely than itself.”
–Colette LaBouff

Vesuvius at Home is phenomenally good—morally good—because it is a record of those who have been subject to cataclysmic geological processes and survived more or less intact. In a key poem, Liou and her father sift through his mother’s ashes, picking out bones, and she asks, “Is this the closest we can come to love?” The answer can only be, “yes,” because at the heart of the paradox of love is a desperate hope in continuance beyond reason. Sure, we can love the dead well enough, but who among us has the nerve to mortify the still living—risk obliterating them—just to show them how well we love them? Only the mad lover, the poet.

–Vernon Ng, Dine College