The Man with My Face: Poems

This debut collection of poetry by Jennifer Tseng traces the immigrant's journey, one filled with distant families, sea crossings, sweet fruits, and buried violins. Whether remembering a father's "unseen clock, his well-wound mystery" or poetically re-imagining the "autobiography of an immigrant," the speaker in these poems never fails to create a sense of intimacy. Tseng's vibrant and penetrating voice urges the reader to follow her to a "society against loneliness,/devoted to memory, language/the translation of dreams."
"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

"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