Hard, green.Ripened, fragile.Spiced cling.Breyers All Natural.Coffee cake, Jell-O,cobbler, preserves.In watercolorwith flowers, birds.Long-life emblem,acidic-sweet.Name of everydowntown street.More Winn-Dixiethan Samarkand.License plate,tollbooth scan.Tiny carvingsin tiny pits—Buddhas, houses,forests, fish—high artisticeconomy.Flesh has a price.Stones are free.
My Life in Peaches
Adrienne Su
Feature Date
- June 27, 2021
Series
Selected By
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
“My Life in Peaches” from Peach State by Adrienne Su, © 2021.
All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburg Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260.
Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Adrienne Su is the author of Living Quarters, Having None of It, Sanctuary, and Middle Kingdom. Her poems appear in many anthologies, including four volumes of Best American Poetry. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she is professor of creative writing and poet-in-residence at Dickinson College.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
University of Pittsburgh
"Food is the meeting point between cultures, between generations, between histories, and in Adrienne Su’s Peach State, food is also resistance and survival. In her engaging new collection of poems, Adrienne Su charts the ways that her Chinese American family adapts—and changes—White, Southern culture for its own uses."
—Paisley Rekdal
"Adrienne Su is one of our best and most readable poets. In her latest book, she offers a rich array of cultural signifiers. With roots in China, but from the American South, she writes with complicated love and wry humor about the fusion of language, food, and family. Elegant, lucid, formally inventive, Peach State is a feast."
—Mark Jarman, author of The Heronry and Dailiness
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
