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Cold Thief Place speaks of the experiences of an undocumented American, her parents who fled Communist China and found safety in fundamentalist Christianity, and how she tried to understand them and herself by way of confessional poems. This is a family story. It tells of a mother who fled an authoritarian government and turned that authoritarianism on to her children. Of a father who made a new life, three times on three different continents and his sea voyage in between. Or what a daughter imagines of these events, as much as it's possible to truly know one's parents. The narrator, who is their daughter, grew up in difficult but very different circumstances, too, undocumented in the United States and was pressured into a green card marriage in order to live a "normal life." One of the myths of America is that Americans are newly formed, defiant of authority and free from old-world traditions. This book speaks to dark side of this myth, of the legacies that my parents wished to escape but instead carried with them, their distrust of government and their desire for an authoritarianism similar to the kind they had fled. Individually, the poems attempt to understand the emotions surrounding these impulses, from the point-of-view of their daughter, who is herself displaced as an undocumented American, that is, a person who is not permitted to be American, and without a home country to return to.
Cold thief place -- The ghost wife -- Hidden one -- I see her best -- The real thing -- Out of the mouths of babes -- Up the mountains down the fields -- When ICE came for me -- Disappearing act -- Ms. L-- describe your petitioner -- Mr. F-- describe your beneficiary -- Done right -- The Badlands -- For my father the West begins in Africa -- In Durban we encountered a problem -- First snow -- Azaleas -- A book about dragons -- Fantasy novel -- Reading Madame Bovary -- Attachment theory -- Diagnosis -- Habit -- Cholera is what my grandfather did -- During the war -- Tell me where the past is -- Listening -- Wuping, 1969 -- Chu Ying -- Winter -- Illegal immigration -- Notes -- Acknowledgments.