Familial Hungers by Christine Wu

Bittersweet, numbingly spicy, herbal and milky, Familial Hungers is a lyric feast. Ginger scallion fish, Sichuan peppercorns, ginseng tea, Chinese school and white chefs—the reader’s appetite is satiated with these poems’ complex palate. There are the bubbling expectations for immigrant daughters, the chewy strands of colonial critique, and dissolving crystals of language loss. Wu relentlessly searches the grocery shelves for the hard-to-digest ingredients of identity and belonging, offering us her nourishing honesty and courage pulled from the marrow.

Praise for Familial Hungers:

“In Familial Hungers, Christine Wu ushers her readers into a world where time expands like cooked grains of rice, love is a bowl of cut fruit, and the dead still eat. Emotionally grounded and precise, Wu’s poetry captures the elusive quality of the immigrant home – a place where tongues stutter and tastebuds recall—and shows us just how desire can linger in a full stomach. Familial Hungers is a full-bodied and deeply satisfying debut.”—Gillian Sze, author of Quiet Night Think

“Reading Christine Wu’s Familial Hungers was emotional for me—each poem ladled with the smells, tastes, and sounds I know so well, deep in my gut. These poems sing forth the food memories we miss and long for, imbued with gustatory ghosts and the etchings of Cantonese on the tongue: ‘the body leaks / this heart language it still knows.’ Wu’s language wades through dreams, altars, broths, milky memory, rage, and immigrant grief, and does so with evocative imagery: ‘I fail Chinese school and live in a house of onion skins.’ Each line lingers with you, sprouting powerful histories among the delicious fronds of watercress.”—Jane Wong, author of How to Not Be Afraid of Everything

Jury Citations

“A drool-worthy, delicious debut from Wu. I felt as though I was reading an almost-recipe book, almost-memoir, poetry collection that gifted my senses a voracious appetite for belonging. Through intimate pen-play, this book tenderly stirs the familial, ancestral, and hand-me-down pots against the backdrop of an often-inhospitable place. There’s a good reason to find yourself hungry while reading Familial Hungers—each page is interested in the savoury, sweet, and sour morsels of life.”—from the jurors of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award