“Jeffrey Thomas Leong’s first book, Wild Geese Sorrow, is a learned and artful translation of poems by Angel Island detainees. In Writ, he has given us his own poems, describing the experience of making translations, alongside his sense of his parents’ time at Angel Island. In this elegant and affecting book, we are reminded that poetry is a medium for mysteries that can’t be solved. With a tonal range as wide as his intelligence is deep, the poet tries “to decipher and decode what cannot be said,” and the resulting effort ignites sparks in the gaps between letters, burning long in the reader’s memory.”
— Natasha Sajé, author of Vivarium
“A son of Chinese immigrants detained at the Angel Island Immigration Station, the author takes a hard look at this history that shaped his family and our nation. Drawing on his father’s stories and his own experiences translating the poems Chinese detainees writ on the barrack walls, Leong forges new poems that seek to fill the gaps of knowledge, heritage, and ‘the interval between beings, / where two may brace the emptiness.’”
— Teow Lim Goh, author of Islanders
“In Writ, Jeffrey Thomas Leong carries out dual acts of translation: gleaning truth though language; piecing together fragments from an obscured, traumatic past. Summoning ghosts of Angel Island and sparked by poems that detainees inscribed into walls, he uncovers silences, builds a powerful chorus. Into this collective saga, he gracefully interweaves his father’s harrowing immigration and detention and reflects upon familial legacy—as a Chinese American, poet, and son. This rich, moving portrait defies erasure, the father-son connection “revealed, even sharper than before.” With elegance of craft and a finely tuned ear, Leong crosses ancestral seas, carves his own journey into existence.”
— Brian Komei Dempster, author of Topaz