Esther Lin – Conversation & Three Poems
for the series, The American Wing
curated by Carlie Hoffman and Tiffany Troy
Carlie Hoffman & Tiffany Troy: “Empirical” begins: “One day the fall ravishes you. / That’s how/ I, and everyone I knew, became New Yorkers.” How does that becoming, and this desire to “make it” beyond “where I could not leave,” shape your vision as a poet?
Esther Lin: For me, “making it” meant moving about the world as freely as others. Literature is an answer for inmates. It creates a commons of the imagination; nothing is held back. In the imagination, I could go to Newport, Rhode Island; a Moscow-bound train; even all the way back to Brazil. Therefore, geography became sentimental to me, more symbolic than real. For example, when I toured France—in person!—I was determined to visit the city of Rouen, because Rouen is where Emma Bovary discovers her taste for excess. It is also where Joan of Arc was found guilty. All women should visit Joan of Arc in some way. I met a Paris friend in Rouen, he was touring Normandy at the time, and he was surprised when I told him the city was important to me. “But you’ve never been here,” he blurted.
Well, of course not.
CH & TT: Many of your poems grapple with the idea of “Americanness.” “Empirical,” for example, straddles between the Queens, New York, of the past, and the Paris, France, of the present; the gulf of time and geography is separated by an asterisk (*). What are some of your hopes for the future of American poetry and its place in our culture?
EL: Last week, I was in Alaska with a dear friend, who praised the beauty of our surroundings via negativa. When our Jeep turned away from Grewingk Glacier, she said, “I’m almost angry when I can’t see the mountains.” Passion for the mountains was superseded by passion for their loss. I thought, this is too gothic a form of love for me. But perhaps I should learn. I associate pessimism with European and Asian cultures, and hope as being spectacularly, idiotically American—myself a spectacularly idiotic American—and now I believe via negativa will become our lingua franca. The Great Experiment has come crashing down . . . the scales have fallen from our eyes . . . and in either case, it seems incumbent that poets speak of what is not, rather than what is.
CH & TT: Both “Standing by the Coop in Julia Resh’s Farm” and “Punishment” desire what the speaker or the women yearn for but cannot have (trust or happiness). In your view, what can poetry offer people today?
EL: I love the idea that poetry can create a new desire and then deny its fulfillment, haha! It seems to me that in the last decade of upheaval, my friends and family have turned to poetry to make meaning of their emotions. These are loved ones who don’t necessarily seek art, but find that it lifts a great psychic burden.
CH & TT: Is there a poem or poetry collection you believe everyone should read at least once—and why?
EL: Oh, sure. I learned so much from Robert Hass’s The Essential Haiku on the image and the crucial “wakefulness” of a haiku. It’s hard for me not to wish for everyone to read the Iliad and the Odyssey. Ariel is probably the correct Plath, but I have a fondness for The Colossus. Rilke’s New Poems feels new. I grew up on Gwendolyn Brooks, and A Street in Bronzeville still grips me.
CH & TT: Writers often build their own creative canon over time. Which poets, writers, artists, or musicians have shaped yours?
EL: The painter Balthus, Greek sculptors of the “archaic” period, independent comics artist John Porcellino, Art Spiegelman, Edith Wharton, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Leo Tolstoy, the fashion designers Madame Grès, Charles James, Iris Van Herpen. I love nineteenth-century Italian opera—the more tragic heroines, the better. I’ve fairly recently discovered netsuke, and I don’t even want to Google how much an old piece might cost.
CH & TT: In closing, what guidance would you give someone reading poetry for the first time?
EL: I’d recommend that you read the books of your teachers, or of the generation you’d consider belonging to, people who have mentored you. Then read the present-day poets who are alive and active today, if they’re not the same as your teachers. Then go further into the past, reading who your teachers read—that’s where the real learning begins.
EMPIRICAL
for my students
One day the fall ravishes you. That’s how
I, and everyone I knew, became New Yorkers.
The sky goes indigo, the ginkgo leaf spins,
then—love! We are captive, like cherries
in a terrine. As a girl, I stole calendars
(I stole so many things) from Barnes & Noble,
my way of affording gifts, for me and my
father. Each Christmas, I chose the solemn sort
with photos of snowy fields, waterfalls, and low
branches from which lichens hang like dress
sleeves. To me, what lay beyond Queens
belonged to people who slept in hotels
and summited mountains. Why shouldn’t I love
where I could not leave. The fall is ravishing.
*
Scrooged in a queue at Carrefour,
pre-sliced cheese and tubes of mayonnaise
rolling in my basket, I make it. I tell my
father, “Ba, I made it!” Through Les Halles
mall, my shadow bronzing the windows
of Sephora, I announce, “Ba, I’ve made it.”
En route to le ciné, where Neo and Trinity
are middle-aged, they punch agents en français,
they have made it and so have I. Only lately
have I accepted that my boyfriend loves me,
even if he has not declared so this morning.
Forests live in the city. Knowledge does not
vanish. The world existed before I saw much
of it. Maybe next year I will see the Alps.
STANDING BY THE COOP IN JULIA RESH’S FARM
Huru huru! The hens race to me. Shitting
luxuriantly, muscovy and runner ducks
come too. Hash blossoms in my cerebellum
and it turns out I’ve brought no feed for them.
The black flank of one cow disappears
into the fog that crouches in the field. My hens
idle like characters in a video game
and ring by ring I lose their attention
to rolypolys under lumber, autumnal
raspberries. Without feed, I am like a hen.
Or a deer. Or, at least, a sheet of corrugated
aluminum. Last night, new nieces lay
their heads against my chest. Their
easy trust shows me that trust is easy.
PUNISHMENT
The boy does not know that
his father speaks of gunning down
his mother. All three of them meet
weekly, the boy goes from a Georgian
townhouse to a one-bedroom that is
crowded by his mother’s pottery
and novels, his cranes and excavators.
So that strangers will not raise the boy,
his father contemplates killing him, too.
(Above all else his father dreads that
he is raised by strangers.) No civilized
force, not even the firefighters
the boy admires so much, would step
between father and mother, or
father and son, to avert a shooting,
not even if, weekly, his father promises,
I’ll fucking kill you, me, and the boy.
The boy will grow up angry, father-hating,
and as graceful as a long-legged hare,
and therefore quite like the heroes
of his storybooks. As for his mother,
she does not say she rescued her boy.
No rescue feels complete. For now
she is grateful the boy cannot read
her heart, around which revolve
the two questions all her women friends
have asked themselves: How can I be
happy? When will punishment come?
About the author:
Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. She is the author of Cold Thief Place, winner of the 2026 Norma Farber First Book Award and longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award. She is also the co-editor of Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora (HarperCollins 2024). She won a Pushcart in 2024, and has been a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Currently, she co-organizes the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers that they face in the literary community.
