by Tiffany Troy

Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for twenty-one years. Her debut collection Cold Thief Place (Alice James Books, $24.95) is the winner of the 2023 Alice James Award. She is also author of The Ghost Wife, winner of the 2017 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship, and her poem “French Sentence” was selected for the 2024 Pushcart Prize. Her poetry has been selected for numerous prizes, anthologies, and fellowships; most recently, she was an artist-resident at the T. S. Eliot House in Gloucester and Cité internationale, Paris. With Marcelo Hernandez Castillo and Janine Joseph, she co-organizes the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers that they face in the literary community.

Cold Thief Place begins in the dark of night, where the threat of deportation is existential for a child-speaker who is both beguiled by and terrified of the Prophet. Through tales historical and fantastical (from sources as variegated as the Chinese Revolution on one side of the speaker’s family and migration from Taiwan first to Brazil and then to the United States on the other), and drawing insight from texts ranging from Madame Bovary to “a book about dragons,” Lin shows her readers how humanity isn’t defined by what documents a person carries or the status they signify. Instead, in the chiaroscuro of the three-train transfer to the Met Cloisters, we find “a more perfect whole / enclosing // gardens laid by scholars of tapestry / and stained glass and the poetry of flowers // and inside one of these / a tree.” Cold Thief Place teaches us that place isn’t what we own but an emotional sphere that we dream to obtain.

Tiffany Troy: The opening poem, which is also the title poem, begins by comparing knowledge of imminent deportation to a kind of religious damnation (“he said my soul as well / as my body could suffer”). There is unknowing and mystery—the fragment “Offering me what I love best” lacks a subject—before the final movement towards the bureaucratic precision of a name and date of birth. How does this poem set up the rest of the collection?

Esther Lin: “Cold Thief Place” showcases the book’s central themes of fear and instability—both bodily, in the fear of deportation, and metaphysical, in fear of the Christian hell. But I should clarify that the metaphysical fear was not metaphorical; it felt real. Now that I’ve had some time away from the book, I see that the characters of the speaker and her family (not uncoincidentally, me and my family) lived in multiple rings of fire, some of their own making. No one demanded that my mother convert to a fundamentalist evangelical Christian, which increased the danger I felt as an undocumented child far more than it created any sense of community. I think “Cold Thief Place” speaks to that vulnerability a child experiences, when no adult seems entirely reliable.

TT: Poems like “The Ghost Wife” or “Attachment Theory” challenge the child’s belief in her own worthlessness (or worthiness by lineage) and the age-old wisdom that before marriage “you are simply / one without a story” in the richness of hell, which is conflated with a sense of statelessness. Place, then, becomes an emotional state, reflecting hunger, non-belonging, and silencing. Can you speak to the organizational principle in the overall structure of the collection, particularly how time functions in developing the family at the heart of the collection?

EL: I wish my answer would reveal the beautiful orchestration I devoted to this book, how I composed a symphony in three movements. But my decisions were practical. Because the same characters appear throughout the book, I wanted to introduce them as a novelist or playwright would their characters. The poem “The Ghost Wife” was handy in presenting the father, the sister, and the death of the mother, so it came early in the collection. I wanted to bring in the husband early to draw parallels between the speaker’s and mother’s lives, since they both use marriage to claim nationhood—one in the U.S. and the other in Brazil.

I’m a restless reader, so even when I dwell happily in a poem, a part of me is already looking for a shift of some kind: a new dimension that heralds what else the poet can show me. After a handful of poems, I want to disrupt what that handful has established—a short lyric poem if the previous were lengthy; a different tone; another perspective. This way, the reading experience feels alive and dynamic, I hope.

The one intentional bit of orchestration was to not break the book in sections. There are so many elements to my complicated life, moving in tandem, that to separate poems by a restful white page seemed disingenuous. The white page is a place of pleasant nothing. Place is very difficult for an undocumented immigrant. One dreams of place as a solid, immutable thing, although it’s simply not true. Place is emotional. And when the place called home doesn’t feel like home, or the place that feels like home is not acknowledged as home, one lives with a fundamental disconnect.

TT: In thinking about my favorite writers from a place, I found that really what I’m drawn to is writers writing from a particular sensibility, one drawn from their struggles being from nowhere, whether that’s an ethnic enclave or not. In Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang, for instance, you’ll find this concentrated dose of energy in a mantou or in the Chinatown sweatshop. How do you feel this desire to concurrently escape and belong finds its place in your work, and how do you root your readers (or your characters) in place?

EL: The most significant geographical place for me is not my birth country, Brazil, or China, which my parents defected from. It’s the New York City borough of Queens. My feelings remain complicated about the sanctuary Queens has been for many undocumented New Yorkers because it’s also where my most difficult memories reside. In my second book, I probably write more about place as an entity—Queens and parts of France. Leaving the U.S. on my own for the first time gave me the fresh perspective I desperately needed. In Cold Thief Place, Queens is perhaps less visible because it is so up close, but my speaker is still very much bound to it, like a ghost.

Place is tricky. I’m not sure I’ve cracked the code on it.

TT: The speaker in Cold Thief Place turns to various texts, such as science fiction novels and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, as a counterpart to her mother’s almost austere but simultaneously expressive form of evangelical devotion. How does fiction operate in the protagonist’s mind, and how do you as the poet complicate the world where the archvillain is grander but also so much bigger than the speaker?

EL: I love this question because I love the novel. A year after my mother died, I read Madame Bovary, and I experienced for the first time some empathy for her in the character of Emma. Emma was trapped in her marriage, station, and little town, and she struggled wildly for more than was her due. Empathy! Such a difficult imaginative leap between a daughter and mother. It allowed me to write “Up the Mountains Down the Fields” and “Wuping, 1969,” wherein my mother was the heroine of her own story. I felt closer to her, yet perversely, the closer I felt, the more unknowable she grew. Having written these poems of her youth, I was at greater ease writing poems in which she appears as a force of pure violence, striking children and destroying books. I hope Cold Thief Place provides a complicated portrait, one that neither demonizes nor absolves.

TT: What you said recalls these lines from “Attachment Theory”:

                           How to

hurt a person in the way
they allow. Every person allows
for it, sooner or later. My mother

was my first.

How does the paradox of closeness and unknowability pan out in the collection as you reimagine other family members in their historical contexts and/or as they approach old age?

EL: It seems to me that one of the tragedies of our existence is that our life spans are long enough—if you’re lucky—to see the tail end of your grandparents’ lives and for them to see you as a baby. It is truly rare for someone to get to know their grandparents as people. As for parents, I wish I could see mine now that I understand them better emotionally. That the people closest to you, like your parents, are unlikely to be in more than half your life. What can I do besides acknowledge that paradox? Yes, we need time away from our parents to understand them better within the historical moment they came of age. I suppose this is why I write the poems; I can talk to them in some way.

TT: I’d like to talk about how your poems work on a micro level, on the level of craft. It seems to me you really work the syntax of your sentences carefully to create particular modes of thought: paranoia, shame, fear, ambivalence, and attachment, to name a few. Break it down for us: How might you encourage other poets to use syntax in this way?

EL: Regarding syntax in poetry, I suppose I would encourage syntactically complex sentences on drafting, and then as one begins wrapping those sentences around lines—I’m thinking of how one wraps a large room in wallpaper—to simplify, simplify that syntax. Poetry enjoys but does not demand pyrotechnic sentence structures, because the line break adds nuance, emotion, direction, and music to each phrase. Probably the longest sentence in Cold Thief Place is from “Winter”:

In order to see my first
pear tree

I took three trains

to a cloister shipped stone by stone
from Spain to Washington Heights,

then reconstructed to a more perfect whole
enclosing

gardens laid by scholars of tapestry
and stained glass and the poetry of flowers,

and inside one of these
a tree. 

This sentence’s task was simple—to compel the reader to forget about the pear tree after the first couplet until it returns in the final line. It’s by no means a complicated sentence, but with white space, I think it achieves this small goal. The sentence travels away from the natural world to list human-made objects: trains, industry, scholarship, stained glass, and the meanings we imbue on the natural world via language. Similarly, the regularity of the (mostly) couplets encourages a sense of order, an embroidering of beauty.

Repetition, on the other hand, can heighten all those dark things you name—paranoia, shame, fear—and I try to use it toward that end. I closed “Done Right,” for example, with the lines “A note has been made. / A note has been made.” I think the repetition there increases the paranoia of a surprise visitation from Homeland Security. It also alludes to the repetitiveness of the immigration process in the U.S., a bureaucratic Gordian knot that requires many forms bearing the same questions over and over, which must be received by various agencies at precisely the right times. Repetition is one of my favorite devices.

TT: There are registers of language and forms of language, and then there are the differences between or among languages. How does the presence of languages inform your collection?

EL: I don’t think about their presence much; languages besides English should be a given in any poetry, and not just poetry by immigrants. Ezra Pound, Amiri Baraka, Paisley Rekdal. Why not? A non-English verse that suddenly springs up in the field of an English poem adds texture and vitality, and Chinese characters do a lovely job of resonating against all these Roman letters. I’m worried someone will accuse me of using Chinese as decoration in my poetry, but I speak with the might of the one language that may eclipse American English soon. In any case, one Chinese character in a sea of English—as it appears in one of my poems—is a pretty good image of my own language skills.

TT: The code-switching felt authentic to me, having grown up in an ethnic enclave as you did, especially as conversational Chinese often differs from reading Chinese characters. I wanted to turn next what you told me once, which was that best poems hurt—and your poems really touched me in articulating what is typically brushed beneath the carpet as the “norm.” How did your vision for Cold Thief Place begin to take root, and what was the writing process like for you? Do you have any tips for aspiring writers who are approaching their family stories in lyric form?

EL: I struggled with the fact that there is so much event in the book: my mother’s life during the Cultural Revolution, my father’s journey to the West, their deaths, my being undocumented, my marriage . . . It seems like a soap opera. But if I could live it, then surely I could harness the energy around these events to make a shapely book, right? Forgive this platitude: as I wrote, I listened. I noticed that the more direct and plainspoken my language, the stronger the poem. I learned not to rest on metaphor or surrealism; they seemed to evoke too much the comfort of beauty, and the poems were stronger if they comforted no one. Ultimately an aesthetic of severity and starkness guided me through to the end of the book.

TT: In a similar vein, what was the research process like in piecing together the lives of your parents? How did you compress or select the highlights from events and harness their energy?

EL: Most of the stories in Cold Thief Place were what my father shared with me. He was a twinkle-eyed storyteller who specialized in monologues that swept from the T’ang Dynasty to the American occupation of Afghanistan, connecting them by folklore of the Silk Road. You needed some stamina to listen to all two hours of it, but it was marvelous. He gave me so many poems. “For My Father the West Begins in Africa” is an almost direct lift of a conversation I had the foresight to record. All the poems I wrote about my mother’s experience in the Cultural Revolution were what he shared with me—my mother rarely talked about her past. Besides my father, I am lucky that my mother’s niece is close with me and my siblings, and that she was willing to give me some dirt!

I like to think of these poems as a continuation of that oral history—my father’s stories, my cousin’s stories—with the energy of confidence, of sharing of secrets. Very helpful for a lyric poem, which demands an editorial point of view.

TT: Who are some poets who inspired you in the writing of Cold Thief Place? How do you pay it forward as a co-founder of Undocupoets, which recently helped spearhead Here to Stay (Harper Perennial, 2024), an anthology of current and former undocumented poets?

EL: I just wrote an essay about how sitting in a workshop with another undocumented poet liberated me to write openly about my status. A lot of the poems in the book arose from the happy coincidence that Eavan Boland invited Javier Zamora and me into the Stegner Fellowship in overlapping years. I don’t think she knew I was undocumented, so it was a pure coincidence! I had just met Janine Joseph and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, too, so my world seemed suddenly more generous, more peopled, less lonely. My art transformed.

I hope that the anthology does the same for other undocumented writers—that we can act as a lightning rod for the attention that they are perhaps nervous about. So that they know there is community waiting for them.

TT: What are you working on now?

EL: I’m trying my hand at ambivalent love poems. Because I’m ambivalent, I don’t know if any of them are worthwhile. I am impatient with love poems—the evocations of rapture, betrayal, and sorrow don’t move me much. Lately what I want is the sort of perversity that Plath, Bidart, and Henri Cole are masters of. I suffer; I hate; I want to humiliate—why not remind my reader what a thrill those emotions are?

TT: We the readers stand ready to be enthralled by your next collection. Do you have any closing thoughts to share with readers?

EL: Lately I’ve been thinking about how New Criticism may have quashed the love of poetry in high school English classes—when I was a student and probably for generations before. When I talk to non-poetry readers about poetry, they reflect on how they despised seeking symbolism or hallmarks of formal unity in the poems they were assigned. A poem presented a scavenger hunt so esoteric that readers walked away feeling stupid, rather than enlivened or curious. How devastating. Perhaps creative writing’s last few decades of popularity have come about due to students trying to find their way back into poetry—if not to write it professionally, then to take pleasure in it.