With both levity and grief, Lisa Low’s Crown for the Girl Inside explores Asian American stereotypes and the too bright-white spaces the speaker finds herself in, whether at parties, on the page, or in her own home. Contemplating “the hole in the conversation where white was not said,” the poems look for new ways to respond to racism while also lamenting the racial challenges of writing about trauma. Public and private, seeing and being seen are reimagined as the poems draw on pop culture along with personal experiences on social media and the speaker’s relationship with her white husband. Prose poems, an erasure, and a sonnet sequence build to a crowning—a kind of rebirth but with cake and candles. Crown for the Girl Inside is about vulnerability, the possibilities and limitations of writing, and what happens when we talk about whiteness as often as we think of it.
Winner of a Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest from YesYes Books, available July 18, 2023
“Lisa Low's Crown for the Girl Inside asks the moving, vexing, beautiful question: when there are so many mechanisms of estrangement, so much alienation and alienating, how do we manage to remain, or become, unestranged from ourselves? Which, in my opinion, is as important a question as there is.”
—Ross Gay, Inciting Joy
“In poetic worlds lush with interiority and meta-awareness, Low’s poems transcribe how the body learns to perform grief—grief inexplicitly bound to racism and racialization of Asian American women in this country. ‘White reader, see how much space you must leap over to see me?’ This same grieving body becomes the catalyst for liberatory practices and resistance. Low’s story, polemic, and lyric boldly call out the problem and restlessly ask us to do the same by saying the word white out loud like an incantation to dispel the root cause of exclusion and dehumanization. Through harrowing acts of tenderness, we feel the uncrumpling of these voices where decolonizing the self emerges as reparative healing.”
—Felicia Zamora, I Always Carry My Bones
“There is such beauty in the direct language of Lisa Low's Crown for the Girl Inside. These poems go to the heart—to the center of the speaker who has lived a life of being silenced, and even sometimes finding comfort in that silence but who nevertheless keeps record. And what I find especially thrilling is how the formal shape of these poems reimagines displacement and quietude as statements in their own right: an apology letter deconstructed or a sonnet crown that overlaps therapy with the act of writing are saying, even sometimes without having directly to say, that the one's presence of body (and the shape a poem makes) establish a space to live.”
—Keith S. Wilson, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love
Cover by Alban Fischer