Review by Jami Macarty
In her third full-length poetry collection, Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive, Jennifer Tseng includes the reader in an epistolary exchange between her and her father. Reading the lyric poems, constructed in part from letters written by Tseng’s father, is as intimate as reading over the poet’s shoulder.
The epistles/poems bring to the fore the “inherent dilemma” within human communication. Despite the impossible and the obdurate, the poems also reveal a humble striving for connection and understanding between parent and child. This parent and child reach toward each other through the challenges of speaking different languages—English and Mandarin—across oceans. Every letter is a “riddle,” “contradiction,” or a “code [they] sent back & forth.”
Tseng is, and therefore her readers are, situated both “Outside [her father’s] letters” and “inside” them, providing a near real-time experience of the poet rereading her father’s letters and writing back to him. “The letters’ spell: / What’s missing.” The poems then are part reconstruction of memory and completion of correspondence while always reaching “farther” for “father.”
In a book “of mourning,” Jennifer Tseng “sit[s] in her father’s Shanghai apartment & eat[s] / His letters.” She “swallows the underworld” of “regret,” digests incoherence, and arrives at a “Plush unity. / A father never ends.”
Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive by Jennifer Tseng. University of Massachusetts Press, April 2024.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.