Description

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Winner of the 2021 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry, a striking exploration of  being undocumented in America

Border Vista intimately narrates the experience of being undocumented, or precariously documented, in America. In poems that consider migration as an ongoing process rather than a finite event, Anni Liu writes exquisitely and on fear (useful and paranoid) and agency, loneliness, and the way the violence of the carceral state shapes our most intimate relationships to each other and to the land. As she does, she revisits moments of unexpected poignancy: searching for turtles in a drainage ditch, picking crabapples along a rural highway, smelling the namesake flower of her mother, who is half a world away.

Praise For…

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"Inviting, dark and quiet, like a museum at night, the poems in Border Vista, by Anni Liu, are about change and transition, about memory (the noun, the keepsake) and remembering (the verb, the practice). They are also, always, highly attentive to language. . . . Liu’s work often holds something in reserve, as dreams do, so that 'astonishment of insight' (as William Meredith put it) is especially striking when it arrives."

— Elissa Gabbert - The New York Times Book Review

"Border Vista is a collection to treasure."
— Ann Amicucci - Colorado Review