Conversation Among Stones
Awakening to histories personal and social, Conversation Among Stones is a meditation on memory and identity.
Through fields of wild grass, restless seascapes, and cities tinged with sand, Willie Lin's debut collection of poetry questions what can remain and what must be pared away in our search for truth. Conversation Among Stones speaks both to the inanimate—misremembered histories, photographs, the dead—and to the voices in our daily lives that reverberate with disagreement and confusion. Punctuated by doubt and resistant to easy transformations, these poems listen and revise. With striking restraint and simultaneous abundance, these poems attempt to reconcile the desire for answers with the necessity of not knowing.
Turn by turn, this collection catalogs moments of approach, fervor, and strife and carries us into a profound quest for understanding: “And that was one conviction: / that we must be to one another / what the world is not / to us.”
Willie Lin was born in Beijing, China and lives and works in Chicago, IL. Her poems have appeared in Bennington Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Threepenny Review, among other journals. She’s the author of the chapbooks Lesser Bird of Paradise (MIEL) and Instructions for Folding (Northwestern University Press), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, and has received fellowship and scholarship support from Kundiman and the Summer Workshop Program at the Fine Arts Work Center.
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