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"This vivid and clean-lined debut weaves strands of personal and family narrative into short poems with wider symbolic force; the best of them contemplate both autobiography and ecocatastrophe. Tseng's free verse creates strong moods:'Apple season, the dog eats his fill and falls asleep beside the space heater./ I thought the world was going to end years ago.'..."—Publishers Weekly
In Sandy Tseng’s first collection, leaving is both what remains and the act of going to another place, a different lifestyle, an unknown afterlife. This book recounts the pleasures and terrors of transition, of being “in between languages.” We travel with Tseng, learning that the sediment of our lives—received traditions, half-recalled memories, accrued possessions—might also be the fragments by which we recognize a future life, here or elsewhere.
Endorsements:
“Tired of a world of short attention spans and frenetic entertainment, I was pleased to totally immerse myself into these quiet, patient, well-crafted poems. It’s been a long time since I have encountered a work of art that has so viscerally invoked my own painful memories of separation, abandonment and exile. This is a wonderful compelling first book.”—Marilyn Chin
“Reading Sandy Tseng’s beautiful and grave first book /Sediment/ is like walking into the invisible force of a great wind. You cannot see the force although you feel its effect everywhere. Only what is absolutely necessary survives in these poems. Images are not ornaments but glimpses, stilled as though by a strobe, in the rush of confusion and darkness of the world. ‘On your white coat, the blood / of a stranger,’ Tseng writes. This is an austere and powerful work.”—Lynn Emanuel
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Among SANDY TSENG'S awards are the 2006 Discovery / The Nation Award, Crab Orchard Review’s 2005 Richard Peterson Poetry Prize, and scholarships from the Vira I. Heinz Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She lives in Denver, Colorado.
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