About the Work
Adoptee Song is a chapbook about transnational adoption conceived around three organizing themes - a childhood of longing and belonging, wings of flight and journey that center the decisions of parents and guardians, and the names and language summoned by this - that explore the cleft between what a life may have been and what it is.
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Praise for Adoptee Song
"In this confrontational collection, Maria Picone tunes her lyric to dissect and interrogate the transnational and transracial adoptee experience of a Korean child adopted by a white American family. From the opening lines, we learn that this is not An American Tail with a happy ending, but that the speaker is "like a good villain" who will "rail against [her] ending." Here are poems which plumb the facts of an adoptee's life, a foreign language which could have been a mother tongue; Picone's startling enjambments reflect the fractures of identity at the levels of language, culture, and race, and her poems, despite their frankness ("You weren't an abortion"), contain multitudes, contradictions, and dualities: "I have two names. I do not have two names." With Adoptee Song, Picone has composed a masterful epic: these poems exist as a primer of resilience and survival not only for the speaker, but for all those who don't feel like they belong."
-Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Ghost Of "Adoptee Song is an instant fixture in my Korean American and adoption poetry canon. Maria Picone's stunning poems seem effortless but began, I imagine, a hundred years ago: to know the self, erasure, guardian angel, love. This is a singular, brilliant music of grace, survival, and self-acceptance, that is to say: a new, redemptive, breath-taking poetry." -Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate and author of Scar and Flower |