A review by qqjj
Afterland by Mai Der Vang

2.0

I am not a confident poetry reader/reviewer, but I struggled to get into most of this. You can tell the poet intensely feels the dislocation of herself, her family, and her culture, which made me want to like this collection. Unfortunately, many poems reminded me of refrigerator magnet poetry. They created one strange image after another, but they were so disconnected (or I couldn't see the connections) that they felt incomplete and I couldn't glean much meaning. I liked a few though (favorites were Grand Mal and Gray Vestige). These were ones that had more of a through-line and a more specific subject, so I could follow the arc of the poem.