Good Son, Kyle Liang
Kyle Liang’s full-length poetry collection, Good Son, encapsulates the “American-born Chinese” diaspora in 70 stunning, heart-rending pages. At its core bleeds a life deeply troubled by Western centrism and not-so-casual racism. Liang details both suppression and acceptance through the lens of a speaker born to immigrant parents in a deft collection that refuses to separate identities into boxes. Explorations of informed consent, the rash of anti-Asian hate crimes that followed COVID-19, and the mockery of speech and accents and social issues intertwine with staggering prose in poems about resilience—and love. What the speaker longs for most is for their heart “to be greedy again.” In these pages is the embodiment of that fathoms-deep exquisite longing for self.
“In Good Son, Kyle Liang writes, ‘In a translation of my body / floating is all that matters.’ In this biting and heartfelt debut collection, Liang explores the complexities of identity and the survival mechanisms we create to live in a cruel world. Sometimes tender and sometimes a fever dream, these poems wrestle with language and its barriers as a speaker navigates different worlds—of medicine, of family, of memory, of being Asian in America. What comes out of this collection is an affirmation that love and connection are necessary to keep going.”
—Jennifer Huang, author of Return Flight
“What a capacious, hungry, and searching collection Good Son is! Liang’s chimeric voice—as the American child of immigrants from two nations, as the hospital clinician all too aware of human tissue’s delicate voltas at work and at home, as the poet in love with the savor of words but reduced sometimes to syntax’s dimmest particles—calls for wisdom in hybridity and flux, for questioning whether we can truly say who is ‘host’ and who is stranger. The poems of Good Son are often wry and playful, yet unafraid of reverence when the lives of others lace one’s ribs and make one gasp with both pleasure and pain in that mutual entanglement. Liang dreams up appetites of mythological dimensions, capable of performing the ultimate disappearing act: ‘So I / hook my fingers into the sides of my mouth / and swallow myself.’ The poems remain behind, brave artifacts of transgenerational fears and desires shaped into powerful song.”
—Laura Kolbe, author of Little Pharma
“Good Son is a wonderful debut full-length collection by Kyle Liang that brilliantly builds off his 2018 chapbook How to Build House. In this collection Liang offers us a more expansive vision of the poet’s place—or lack of place—as an ‘ABC’ (American-Born Chinese), floating between the worlds of English and Mandarin and not entirely at home in either. ‘In a translation of my body,’ he notes in one poem, ‘floating is all that matters.’ Liang also offers his unique perspective as a physician assistant working in a New York City hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic, strangely on the inside of the crisis but suspected as an outsider based on how he looks: ‘I hold my breath waiting // for when I’m the host / and not the pathogen.’ There’s a haunting loneliness at the heart of the collection, particularly in the poet’s depiction of his ABC childhood, stranded between languages and cultural expectations: ‘i stood by the door thanking guests / as they left. halfway through i noticed / my lips were saying i’m sorry instead.’; Kyle Liang is one of the most promising young poets writing today, and I couldn’t be prouder or more excited about the publication of this book.”
—Jason Koo, author of No Rest