Lost in America is a richly detailed, many-layered evocation of a unique American experience. Daughter of a German mother and an immigrant Chinese father, Lennie Hay takes her readers on a quest to recover some essential sense of identity beyond the self. As she investigates the past through memory and research, paying close attention to places and people she has known, she uncovers hidden truths, exposes injustices, and reimagines the stories that shape a life. In the poems of Lost in America readers can find deep feeling, clear insights, hard truths, and the voice of a poet who knows her story connects to all our stories. “I ache for us all,” she says, and we know she means it.

In this stunning collection, Lennie Hay searches for her roots, for understanding of where she came from and who she is. Her search becomes the archetypal search we all share. Who hasn’t been an outsider in some dimension? These are poems of word intoxication, sensuous beauty. She, and thus we, are blessed with rich, textured memories that go to the bone. Lost in America is a breath-taking accomplishment.

Neither Cantonese daughter, nor German farm girl, the speaker in these poems seeks to stake a place for herself and her family—a welcoming place, free of prejudice, where one can feel at home in one’s country of birth. During her own journey, she seeks answers to family secrets, embraces the natural beauty of the landscape, savors succulent flavors, connects with past and present members of an ever-evolving family. I love the luscious language of these poems, the moving and relatable voice, the stories of forgiveness and deep understanding that we need more than ever.

Because hunger follows [her] everywhere,” Lennie Hay’s dazzling collection of poetry looks unflinchingly at the realities of loss. She interrogates her Chinese heritage as she considers the loss of loved ones and wrestles with her own mortality. All of this is masterfully and fiercely executed. Food is never just food and eating is an act of inheritance, mourning, love, and reckoning. Hay’s work is deeply sensitive and acutely witnessed. This is a book that perfectly balances the knife edge of that which fills us and that which empties us. In it, school children “carry their nightmares in backpacks” and the “grave Gulf keeps [her] secrets.” I Feed the Dead is filled with tenderness, beauty, and clarity and I loved every word.

In I Feed the Dead, Lennie Hay writes with skillful attention to the textures and tensions of daily life. Through an Asian-American speaker, the collection explores how identity is shaped by ancestry, appetite, labor, and care. The speaker’s forage through a lineage scattered across immigration records, where family names reduce ancestors to “another variation / a ghost misspelled” culminates in the bold declaration “I claim all our names.” At the heart of the collection, a formal ambition emerges in a crown sonnet where language turns from appetite to predation. Its interlocking lines carry us from “Bilbao’s dim sum” and “pintxos” to a “viral feast” that “waits to gorge on Spain,” enacting contagion through repetition. Hay’s sensory poems bear witness to life’s seasoned moments, unfurling like hand-pulled noodles in Lanzhou, stretched and folded, structure married to art.

It takes courage to face aging for what it is and to where it inevitably ends. In I Feed the Dead, Lennie Hay takes on the subject as scholar and artist. She describes the tradition of leaving food and gifts at loved ones’ gravesites, intending to keep them safe and content, alive in the minds of the living. She revives her parents and siblings in the vivid language of poetry, as she does a lost friend advising the poet to write more poems. Among the last poems in the book, Hay takes us to her raucous Zumba class, to a jazz festival, and on a voyage with her husband up the St. Lawrence Seaway, leaving his illness at home. The poet offers a guide for living fully and loving widely in poems that are wise, joyful, honest, and informed.