When, seventeen years later, I return, I discover my fatherwalks faster than I can keep pace, knowing more than I doabout what time means and what distances we mustcross. Seeing him round the lake’s edge, as if alone, withoutthe anomaly of my presence, I want to ask him: Whotaught you to look at a bird? When did you first recognize meas your own? The first time I lost him was in the marketwhen I took the hand of a man who was himuntil he looked down with another face. I was afraid then,too. Now I stop on the path.All the long minutes of my absence materialize, pulsewith each step he takes toward the rest of the world.Who is abandoning whom?Strangers pass around me, they to whom I have no obligation.Now the man that is him stops, too, and not findingme, makes his way back through the crowdtoward where I wait. When he sees me,who will I be?
Misapprehension
Feature Date
- April 20, 2023
Series
Selected By
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
“Misapprehension” from BORDER VISTA: by Anni Liu.
Published by Persea Books on April 12, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by Anni Liu.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Born in the year of the metal goat, Anni Liu is the author of Border Vista (Persea Books), which won the Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and was a New York Times Best Poetry Book of 2022. She’s the recipient of an Undocupoets Fellowship, a Djanikian Scholarship from the Adroit Journal, and residencies at Civitella Ranieri and the Anderson Center. She’s an editor at Graywolf Press.
“In Anni Liu’s astonishing first book, we are witness to a wandering through all kinds of borders…”
—Ross Gay
“This is a masterful, singular debut.”
—Janine Joseph
"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."
—Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times Book Review
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
