Return Flight

Return Flight / Jennifer Huang / Milkweed Editions, January 18th, 2022 - $16 (Paperback)

“I think my home lies in moments.” 

Jennifer Huang’s Return Flight winds itself through retrospection and introspection throughout the fault lines of the home, the body, and the self. Huang writes, “what I know is what I imagine,” and what they know is the elaborate mythologies and topographies of Taiwanese folklore wrapped in an intimate portrait of family history. In shapeshifting gods and spirits, the poems find beauty in the past and probes the meaning of our physicality. Celebrating their culture and questioning the self, Huang’s poems travel the length of their lineage up to the present day, framed by memories and moments. In the tempo of “beating hearts / through objects passed down,” Huang allows us entrance into the aching feeling of not knowing what to call home—not knowing where to turn to in the strange quiet of the night—and how it weighs on the body.  

However, Return Flight departs from melancholy and enters into the complexities of beauty and desire through a gentle yet attentive voice. And the place we land is comfortable: where an orange’s sweet stickiness sticks underneath your fingernails, where you wake to the stinky but welcome smell of chou doufu, and where two papayas touch outside the window. As the year of the rabbit comes upon us, turn to Jennifer Huang’s brilliant voice to remember what it means to ask for home and how it feels once you find it. 

--Ashling Lee