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  • Creative Writing:Poetry
  • Dorothy Wang, chair, Kazim Ali, and Cathy Linh Che

The judges have enthusiastically selected Amanda Ngoho Reavey's Marilyn as the winner of the 2017 AAAS Award for Best Book in Creative Writing: Poetry. This collection is daring in its formal restlessness, traversing the genres of poetry, memoire, and essay and bringing together the lyric and the documentary (by means of language and photographs). It is also courageous in its clear-eyes exploration of the many complex aspects of transracial adoption and in its unblinking calling out of racism in its various forms, both personal and structural. Reavey details though poetic means painful and lonely experiences of feeling untethered but, equally, flashes of beauty and tenderness that inhere in various lived moments, in nature, and in language. Marilyn also asks us to consider what has been elided—erased, ignored, unspoken, in these acts of transnational transracial adoption. This facet of the Asian diasporic experience, that of Asian adoptees who have been raised in all-white families in the United States, has rarely been explored in poetry. As a whole, Marilyn calls to mind the pathbreaking work of Bhanu Kapil and Theresa Cha. Reavey chose the verb, "ngoho" has her new name; so, too, her book itself is a motion, a movement, an uncovering, and a restructuring. Marilyn is a fearless book of poetry that expands the possibilities of English-language poetry. [End Page 465]

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