WANDERING by Georgia San Li

That the speaker of Wandering knows displacement well is reflected in the explosive power of the poems’ images: a widow’s thank-you cards, a discarded banana peel rolled into a paper cup, the bravery of “new summer peaches and pears…displayed to face the soggy dawn.” These deeply moving poems understand, and evoke vividly, the way the past blossoms suddenly in the present. One of their many gifts is to give voice to the contradictory nature of human experience—how the seemingly solid can shift, and how uneasily we abide in the temporary now, like the passengers in the “small, small / disconnected world” of an airport in pandemic time, “waiting in the air of masks, / each of us alone and surrounded, / waiting to enter somewhere else.”

–Nan Cohen, author of Unfinished City and Thousand-Year-Old Words

The poems in Wandering, by Georgia San Li may follow a wavering path as the title suggests, but they do so with an intense commitment to the oases they encounter along the way. The containers and punctuation may shiftshape in adherence to the tempers the verses determine, but all the while, the speaker builds detailed dioramic worlds that demonstrate a tensile strength uncommonly rich on the page. Li writes of exodus and war, mortality, family, and faith, but without suffering or sentimentality. The power of these poems, accumulates exponentially as you go, delivering an abundance of nutriment and endurance for the reader with an unsparing beauty and attention. These are poems of transportment, “where I would succumb to / intoxication, the sultry taste of the earth in / my mouth, and where I lost all sense of outer space.”–
–Peggy Dobreer, author of Forbidden Plums, curator of Slow Lightning Lit

Wandering is a kaleidoscope of a collection, a glorious layering of past and present, colour and grit, moving together and coming to rest in a new shape. I loved it.

–Anna Freeman, author of The Fair Fight

Georgia San Li’s, Wandering, is a collection of fearless poetic imaginings that guide the reader with a supple hand through the nervy rawness of posing the question: Why come this far? The poems animate the cracks of life, dissolving and swirling into atmospheres of awe, uncertainty, and into the light of irony, family, and how we hold on or let go.

–Emily Rubin, author of Stalina