Moving from childhood to adulthood, the author’s new poetry collection confronts and reconciles expectations in order to live authentically.
The cover of Lisa Low’s Replica features the portrait of a young Asian woman with indifferent, if not sad, eyes. With her hair pulled back in a side braid and her skin a light green hue of jade, her head is bisected cleanly at the mouth, the bottom half of her skull revealing the white and blue porcelain of fine china. The bifurcation reveals a quiet violence, one that could potentially render her silent. On the other hand, it might just be the rupture needed to break her wide open.
Like the woman in this portrait (a self-portrait entitled “Celadon, Porcelain” by Yuqing Zhu), the mouth of the speaker in Replica is wide open and speaks about, around, and directly to whiteness. Part girlhood diary, part craft lecture, and part reality-TV show confession, Low’s debut full-length collection takes us from the spaces of childhood (playgrounds, hair salons, elders’ bedsides) to those of adulthood (graduate school parties, Reddit rabbit holes, the home shared with a partner) and charts the nuanced ways the narrator has grappled with her proximity to and relationships with whiteness. At first, she feels timid in her approach to the subject, guardrailed by anxiety and societal expectations. But as the speaker moves through the collection, they become brash and unapologetic, talking about whiteness “indiscriminately,” not caring to “test the comfort of my audience in advance” (“Feedback Loop”). …
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