Bodega

“We admired Bodega tremendously for its tireless, exemplary formal invention which is not only a marvel for its own sake, but in Hwang’s hands, it also becomes a dazzling analog for the many-ness and energy of our nation’s urban spaces. Su Hwang is gifted with the art to turn the mundane into the powerfully poetic.”

“Bodega is one of the most experimental and ambitious projects that I have encountered. Hwang, like her immigrant parents who moved to an unknown land, takes a risk by experimenting with form, making innovative aesthetic choices, and writing sweeping narrative-driven poems … The poems in Bodega are vulnerable, baring open a raw portrayal of immigration and assimilation.”

“Bodega takes place in 1992 during the Los Angeles Riots, with the war on drugs as its backdrop. Set in the speaker’s neighborhood bodega, these narratives consistently and smoothly shift structure and form, complicating the American story as it foregrounds the immigrant experience.”

“[Bodega] poignantly considers how every interaction between people is freighted with history and tied to identity. The collection’s poems constantly return to the titular space—those small corner stores in New York City crammed with every good one can possibly imagine—where, between narrow aisles and across the counter, the tensions evoked by cultural difference, prejudice, and class simmer and sometimes boil over … suggesting that the bodega is a politically-charged microcosm for life in the surrounding city, if not America as a whole.”

“If we are not in denial, to name one life, one narrative, we must name many. This is a responsibility that Su Hwang steps into with elegant care. Her poems in Bodega are observant and cinematic, tracing the ways our many-languaged lives come up against each other in these united states. I’ve been waiting for a collection like this, difficult and prismatic as it is.”

“Splashed against a milieu of suspicion, shift, and tumult, these keenly honed narratives––crafted by a poet bristling with unassailable talent––are the testimonies of a child very much within and without a ‘home’ in the traditional sense. What Su Hwang has done is chronicle a small, utterly necessary life as it stumbles toward its root in a world that both abandons and embraces. You will be pulled relentlessly into these stanzas and you will see yourself here.”

“If, as Wittgenstein posited, words are probes capable of reaching great depths, then Su Hwang’s Bodega is a quarry—mining directly into the immigrant heart, the daughter’s heart, the American heart. Real excavation always rends and breaks and works to bring something new into the light. I am grateful for this book, for all of Hwang’s illuminations.”

“Su Hwang’s poems reenergize our communal memories of family and culture. She weaves story with perception and the result is the emergence of a poet whose instinct raises language to a fresh level. This unforgettable book places the poet in the forefront of experience and convinces me that Audre Lorde was correct when she stated, generations ago, that ‘poetry is not only a dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.’”

“Through the poetry of family and community, the collective and the self, Su Hwang’s Bodega delivers an unflinching lyric missive to, and for, the complicated hearts that power a city––those whose voices and lives, beautifully and resolutely rendered, defy dismissal.”