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.”

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.

作者簡介



Sarah Yihsuan Tso

　　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.