Interviews & Additional Writing:

BOMB with Wendy Xu
Poets & Writers: Ten Questions
Nightboat Blog with Em Lu Gao
futurefeed: “Notes on Reversing”
futurefeed: “On Homophonic Association”

"Dazzlingly multidirectional” —Cindy Juyoung Ok, Harriet Books

“Luan’s meditative debut explores the Taiwanese diasporic experience through poems rich with vivid imagery, imagination, and candor that draw from the classical tradition of the Chinese 'reversible' poem." —Publishers Weekly

“What happens when one attempts “return” to a place or way of being in the world? The poems are dualistic, simultaneously embodying and critiquing nostalgia, mourning and welcoming loss.” —Poets & Writers

“A book of both startling intimacy and formal excitement, neither compromising the other, 回 / Return is an assured and moving debut that navigates the murk (and heft) of the past, dissatisfied with easy nostalgia.” —Wendy Xu, BOMB

“Luan’s non-hierarchical approach lets go of the mastery over meaning, making space for her reader’s coexistence inside her forms… Her lyric transparency reminds us of the porousness of language, how our reception is what gives the poem signification, how necessary we are to making it live.” —Angie Sijun Lou, The American Poetry Review

“Luan’s poems, which alloy Chinese and English into feats of formal ingenuity and beauty, translate the unspeakable. Read it once, then read it again slowly to perceive the spectrum of emotions Luan unseams with dexterity. 回 / Return heralds a potent new voice in poetry." —Cathy Park Hong

“Luan’s voice is almost shocking in its intimacy—reading this book is like suddenly being able to see emotions at the cellular level, across seas, through generations, between languages. Luan’s poetry pierces the surface of consciousness and swims powerfully into her own and our depths. Gorgeous, wondrous, genius." —Brenda Shaughnessy

“With gorgeous poems that breach and bridge the linguistic abyss, Luan guides us through a troubled-water poetics—’I heard the world as if through the belligerence of water’—in this sharp, prismatic and wonderfully radiant book." —Sawako Nakayasu

“Emily Lee Luan, in a luminous debut, refuses to forget, knowing “my Sorrow was unafraid and it gave me back my bravery and anger.” And, rather than cede, invites and innovates through form, tongue, tenderness, and image. These poems are sigils carved from heartmemory to confront and restore." —Anthony Cody

“Luan experiments with language and poetic form, blending the lyric, narrative, and visual to create poems that resist translation. This collection insists on fragmentation and altered realities; the self is muddled and intertwined within a greater ancestral history.” —Sophia Chong, The Adroit Journal

There are an infinite number of things to say about Emily Lee Luan’s virtuosic 回 / Return. . . [the poems] are informed, inherently, by separation and distance; by missing, mourning, melancholy; by migration, exile; by the desire to return; by the impossibility of returning; by the disappearance of the past in the simultaneously centrifugal and centripetal force of the present. —Brandon Shimoda, Poetry Society of America