BOOK

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Landia

Belladonna*, 2018

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Landia excavates literal and figurative borderlands—redrawn boundaries, architectural palimpsests, underground transport systems—to reckon with the historical and cultural forces that shape our cities and our intimate lives. 

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In her impressive debut collection, Celina Su extends the possibilities of the poetic, bringing as much careful attention (and firsthand experience) to the concrete details of what she calls “prosaic subjection” as she does to the syntax and moods of poetic language... Landia brings together the freedom of the poetic imagination and the realities of state and corporate power, forcing us to re-think the borders of the literary and of the political. 

—Dorothy Wang, author of Thinking Its Presence

A consummate wordsmith, Celina Su’s Landia... proves that mapping is as subjective as memory and language.

—Paul Beatty, author of The Sellout

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Celina Su’s anti-imperial glossaries and roving dérives... evoke a radically different kind of civic engagement... “Between points A and B” obtains a lyric solidarity, and I thrill to that prospect. 

—Cam Scott, author of Romans/ Snowmare

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Celina Su’s Landia is worldly in the best sense: it is truly about the world. A capacious and much needed response to America’s rising xenophobia, Landia makes another argument as well: that we are all now displaced, uprooted by changing national borders, travel, migration, real estate markets and time itself... “I cannot differentiate the homage from the lament,” Su writes. Landia is both. You will finish it all the wiser.
—Alissa Quart, author of Monetized

Celina Su's Landia could be the future of English poetry.

—Tse Hao Guang, author of Deeds of Light

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In the dream-real spaces of “succulent mines,” words travel, dart, bleed, and hide like refugees, like aid workers, like artists, like animals, like exiles, like warriors. The unsettled unsettles everywhere. And yet is seen, known, made viscerally apparent in Celina Su’s astonishing poems. 
—Cindi Katz, author of Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives

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