Born in South Korea and raised in Montana and Colorado, Leah Silvieus now travels between Florida and New York as a yacht chief stewardess. She is the author of Anemochory (Hyacinth Girl Press 2016) and has a second chapbook forthcoming from Bull City Press in 2018. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Miami and is a books editor for Hyphen magazine. Visit her at leahsilvieus.com.
This November, to recognize and honor National Adoption Awareness Month, I've invited adoptee poet Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello to curate a folio of poems by 10 Asian American adoptees. This page features "Field Elegy" by Leah Silvieus. I invite you to take a moment to read her moving introduction to the folio here, as well as the other nine poems in this collection.
— Eugenia Leigh, Poetry Editor
Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds blooms with the sort of gorgeous lines that elicit that familiar, satisfied poetry grunt from audiences during readings. You know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever been to a great reading -- that kind of guttural assent that rises unbidden when one hears a line or an image that is really, really good -- when a line is so expertly crafted with regard to prosody, image and idea that it strikes a chord deep within, and you can’t help but respond.
The practice of cartography is as much about choosing what one draws on a map as it is about what one chooses to leave off; it is about charting the known world as well as designating the spaces where “here be dragons.” It is this negotiation of representation that Kenji Liu so deftly and beautifully navigates in Map of an Onion, the national winner of the 2015 Hillary Gravendyk Prize and finalist for the