Summary

“Writing Letters to Mao” by Jennifer S. Cheng recounts the making of the author’s first book of published poems. The poems have been discussed as love letters to Mao Zedong, the leader of the Cultural Revolution in China. She responds that a love letter is “something broken, too” (175)—her parents immigrated to the United States from their home country to escape the turmoil. She considers Mao like an estranged, calamitous family member or like a ghost woven into the family’s story, one that creates a fragmented personal family narrative.

Niina Pollari’s “Dead-Guy Shirts and Motel Kids” narrates her arrival in Florida from Finland. Her parents, after taking a vacation in Florida, move the family. They begin their life in Florida living in a motel. School and work discipline is not as strict, and Pollari and her friends are left to...