Each Crumbling HouseWinner of the 2010 Perugia Press Book Prize.
Melody Gee proves to us through her poetry that first-generation Asian American experiences still matter and will always matter. But even more so, her quietly unsettling and powerful book speaks to the whole human experience through its exploration of inheritance. These are haunting poems about culture, nature, and ultimately about love. --Victoria Chang Melody Gee’s Each Crumbling House
is a tale of return not marked by triumph, but of a palpable absence.
The poems’ speakers “count arrows of exiled/geese” to know not only
about what it is to feel cold, but what it is to leave home. There is
comfort here, too: in the spaces of longing, an understanding is
reached upon the return to homeland. While the speakers are reaching
for ways to name the pain of lost histories and lost relatives,
“always/a word away from the word,” Melody Gee’s poems are full of the
right words, folding and unfolding the way that wings do from the mass
clusters of Monarch butterflies wintering in the pines, huddling
together for warmth. —Oliver de la Paz
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