Roses de Matin

Drawn from her Taiwanese childhood, life in Taiwan as well as the anecdotes of Chinese and Hakka ancestors, Sarah Yihsuan Tso’s debut collection of poems written in English dwells on a vast array of topics such as bias, culture, suffering, luck, philosophy of life, Christianity, Buddhism, sexism, poetics, beauty, ethnic and gender groups, manhood, womanhood, environmentalism, geopolitics, migration, immigration, nature, and the inexorable fate of mortality. Written in an audacious, refined, and unique language par excellence, the book wrenches sapience from troves of dazing and memorable lines like: “The fate of concession is worn daily” in “a land ceded from the Dragon King, the Eastern Neptune.” “In this country, women and children are / conjoined twins.”

Dr. Sarah Yihsuan Tso is Associate Professor at National Taiwan Normal University. She is the author of The Extension of Space in Globalization: The Globally Extended Space and Human Rights in Theories and Modern and Contemporary Taiwanese and American Poetry (2020), Global Time-Space Reorderings: Literary, Cultural, and Cinematic Transformations (2014), journal articles and book chapters on Taiwanese poetry, culture, and cinema, globalization, American multicultural poetry and novels, feminism, and John Keats, as well as poems.

CONTENTS

Global Meditations
Under the Winter Roof 10
A Companion Poem to “Lord Leaf” 11
A Literary Language 12
Aubade for Sufferers 13
From to 14

Flowers of Life
A White Mare 16
An Amethyst Gecko 17
Flowers Don’t Speak 19
An Excursion 20
The Little Bird 21

Buds of Time
Does It Matter 24
Life Is Both 26
Why Do You 27

Psalms of God and Buddhas
Cheng 30
Songs of Water 31
Diamonded Cross 32
Never Alone 33
Sign 34

Women’s Musings
In this Country 36
Ms. Lin Can Drive 37
The Male Half: American Men 39
Not Darwinian 40
The Story of Mazang’s Metamorphosis 41
To Harassing Old Guys and Little Demons 42
Men in Taiwan 43
Women of a Kind 44
Women’s Musings 45

Arias for Taiwan and Ancestors
Fantasies 48
Fragrance from Progenitors 49
Wontons of the Father’s Daughter 51
Hakka Sister 52
Or, Witch 53
Gem Flowers 55
From the Sea of the Dragon King 56

Notes 58

Under the Winter Roof

Under the winter roof,
the curlicues, shells, and filaments of heat currents
rose to the naked hands with white webs in the dry winter as
all was icy and gray outside the translucid windows,
wind blaring as pine needles swayed and shrubs trembled—

The heart was touched, as if by a bowl of brown-sugared red bean soup,
or by the five-legged sinewed hands in Van Gogh’s self-portrait?

Taiwanese sweet potatoes, indigenous bee larvae,
pilgrim and Latino corns, Irish potatoes, African nara melons,

and, in wintry bleakness
outside, the red wine of the homeless.