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Mine is available through Amazon. Use the link below to order the book.

Mine, a collection of poems by Tung-Hui Hu, was published by Ausable and Copper Canyon Press in the spring of 2007. The book gathers lyric writing that moves between personal experience and the larger landscapes of history, repair, and return. Hu's language is spare and direct, and the poems carry a quiet weight that rewards rereading. The collection is also available in paperback, and readers seeking a first encounter with this work can begin with the excerpts published alongside the ordering information on this page.

What strikes most immediately about these poems is the way the personal and the geological share the same vocabulary. Desire, awkwardness, and the memory of a place are set beside ploughshares, soil, and water, so that a body becomes a kind of terrain. Hu does not explain the connections he draws; he trusts the image to carry them. The result is writing that feels excavated rather than composed, blunt and resonant in the same breath, and confident enough to leave its silences in place.

Several of the poems attend to the idea of repair, of undoing and re-making what time has damaged. Hu speaks of earth that contains both the tender and the ruined, and of myths that people construct out of their own histories. In these works the ground is never merely background. It is a participant, holding memory, seed, and decline at once, and the voice that addresses it is by turns confessional, wry, and unsentimental about the cost of staying put.

Hu has also written The Book of Motion, a companion volume that extends the same preoccupation with bodies in motion and landscapes under pressure. Reading the two together reveals a consistent concern: the ways people travel, work, and belong to a country that is itself shifting beneath them. The poems here include fresh images of riverboats, greenhouses, lighthouses, and fresh-cut flowers, each one rendered with a painterly attention that keeps the ordinary strange.

Ausable and Copper Canyon Press have long published poetry that takes the measure of place and history with unusual seriousness, and this collection fits comfortably within that tradition. Reviews of Mine have noted its provocation, its gesture toward cinematographic radiance, and the skill with which it composes difficult material into something easily held. For readers who arrive at the poems through an excerpt, through a reading, or through the recommendation of another book, the ordering details here offer a straightforward way to continue.

Publisher & Press

Further Reading

Mine was published by Ausable Press, now part of Copper Canyon Press. Critical reception is collected on the reviews page, including the Rain Taxi Review of Books.

• Ausable Press
• Copper Canyon Press
• Rain Taxi Review of Books