The Fragrant Harbor

By Vida Chu

We begin with a pipa melody wafting in from the distance and a scholar lowering his wine cup, and we step inside a world that is both exotic and familiar: Magao Caves hewn by ancient monks, sleeve dancers, mountains painted Ming imperial red. What makes this world familiar is the quiet, intelligent, often whimsical, always brave voice of the poet, attentive like her scholar to the fly on the brim of a hat or cicadas with their mating calls "like marbles rattling in wooden boxes." The Fragrant Harbor travels to a distant troubled Shanxi past and a pile white bones at Lake Kokonor; to the shouting of Red Guards heard when holding a silver box shattered during the Cultural Revolution; to a time of lost innocence when a gallon of gas cost less than a donut. Vida Chu's book faces dislocation and loss and reminds us there are "no easy solutions for anything;" yet she unflinchingly propels us into the future of "grandma duty." Hers is an art of resistance in the best sense. It is a gentle art; it is a tough art. Like her "Water" that takes "Tai Chi steps . . . and pounds the rocks with fists like Kung Fu masters," Vida Chu's The Fragrant Harbor helps us to meditate on the infinite. This is poetry at its most fragrant, its most potent, its finest. -Christopher Bursk, author of The Improbable Swervings of Atoms In The Fragrant Harbor, Vida Chu takes us into vivid imagery of Chinese tales, art works, and her own childhood memories to illuminate the present world as colored by the past. Chu bears witness to an American reality as seen through her Hong Kong roots-ancient tomb sculpture, a childhood beach in Hong Kong, 1970s Beijing cyclists in "drab blue Mao suits," a 30-year-old tight dress into which she can no longer fit "no matter how much I wriggle / like a snake I cannot get back /into the molted skin." With well-chosen details and intense language she makes the reader share thoughts and feelings expressed in these poems. Her work spans the ages, a tapestry of foreign memoir and cunning observation woven together for us by Chu's gracious telling of her travel between two worlds. -Jean Hollander, author of Crushed into Honey

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0692303510
• ISBN13: 9780692303511
• Release Date: October 2014
• Publisher: Alabaster Leaves Publishing
• Length: 60 Pages
• Weight: 0.31 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.1" x 6.0"