"Trees"
from Jennifer Tseng's
The Man With My Face

Jennifer Tseng:

Jennifer Tseng was born in Indiana and raised in California. She received her MA in Asian American Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, her MFA from the University of Houston and she was twice a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. In addition to having taught Asian American Studies and Creative Writing at UCLA and Hampshire College respectively, she has taught Poetic Forms for Khmer Girls in Action in Long Beach and Poetry in Translation for the A Room of Her Own Foundation in New Mexico. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Barrow Street, Glimmer Train Stories, Indiana Review, Ploughshares and elsewhere. She lives in California and Massachusetts. (Photo by Maceo Senna)

About The Man With My Face:

"Sometimes poetry feels like a real community whether it was intended to or not. I experience that very much with Jennifer Tseng's remarkable The Man With My Face. I want to be 'him.' Whoever he is or is not — more importantly I want to be many of the people and lives here — the lives in these poems make room for the lives around my life. Met and as yet unmet. Tseng writes a poetry that is constantly vibrant and penetrating."
— Michael Burkard

"This is a book filled with 'music at once spun and wild, rough and silky': the music of appetite, of wanting and not wanting to know... The Man With My Face strives to understand what 'home' is... — nostos, nostalgia, nostomania — in a new language, part-inherited and part-invented, part-Chinese and part-American... Tseng both elucidates the ancient questions of language, immigration, foreignness, desire — the distance between lovers, between fathers and mothers and daughters — and honors their irreducible mystery..."
— Suji Kwock Kim

"The immigrant father carries the old country in his own body, and for his children the father's body is always a link to a lost world. In Jennifer Tseng's signature poem, 'Indecipherable Guide to Strange Birds,' two daughters study an unreadable chart where their father’s recorded the fluctuations of his own body, and learn only that he is 'a master of codes, king of all the beautiful birds in America.' Such moments are illuminated here with grace and a force of feeling, especially in the beautiful sequence of prose poems that closes this striking and insightful debut."
— Mark Doty

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