Motherlands: Poems

Max Ritvo Poetry Prize

By: Weijia Pan

Narrated by: Weijia Pan

• Book was selected by Louise Glück as winner of the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, joining a growing list of successful poetry debuts, including Michael Kleber-Digg’s collection Worldly Things, which has sold more than 4,000 copies
• Author is a poet and translator from Shanghai, China; his poems have appeared in AGNI, Boulevard, Copper Nickel, Georgia Review, New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere.
• Book’s engagement with history and identity, transnationalism (China and the U.S.), the Covid-19 pandemic, and Maosit/Post-Maoist China will appeal to a wide audience

©2024 Weijia Pan (P)2024 Milkweed Editions

Critic reviews

“In Motherlands, Weijia Pan recalls the China of the past and the United States of his present—and the vast connections between them, connections that exist as much in deep history as they do in immediate consciousness. In poems at once intricate and expansive, Pan considers the fact of displacement and the vagaries of translation, as re-creation, transformation, betrayal. Here, he finds opportunity in portraiture and music to consider both global injustice and the most delicate nuances of feeling. ‘Time’s time’s timestamp,’ he writes, ‘which means that time keeps its own records.’ And what records these are—imagined in brilliant poems by an essential young poet.”—Kevin Prufer, author of The Fears

“In Weijia Pan’s brilliant first collection, Motherlands, the personal is political—and imaginary. And historical. But also, made entirely from our collective moment in the world. Contemporary environments blend temporally with great thinkers and artists of the past. Pan and his speakers are in a deep and deeply felt conversation with time itself. And Pan captures these complexities in language with so much crackle and verve, so much strange and surprising energy, with such animated stories and interesting information, that I couldn’t put the book down. Motherlands is a singular accomplishment by one of the most dynamic new voices in contemporary poetry.”—Erin Belieu, author of Come-Hither Honeycomb

“How intimate and personal the vast forces of history—history of country, family, art—become in Motherlands, Weijia Pan’s striking debut. In one poem, Pan tries to leave China a voicemail; in another, he imagines a grandfather home from guerrilla war, being handed a broken bowl. Wit and empathy inform these poems, and a love of music and poetry—as well as a time-taught sense of the precariousness of peace, of a time when ‘an invisible hand’ might grab his shoulders, to say: ‘Are you Weijia? Something’s happened. Come this way.’”—Dana Levin, author of Now Do You Know Where You Are

“From his father’s ‘flip-flops making a broken ragtime on the street’ to playing a Liszt é tude that evokes Stalin marking death warrants with non-photo blue pencils, Weijia Pan writes with verve and transforms the personal into cultural history. Motherlands is a remarkable debut.”—Arthur Sze, author of Sight Lines