Poetry. Asian American Studies. WALKING BACKWARDS is about making a home when you are a nomad, and adding an American self to the many selves that the world's myriad, bewildering places throw at one body. It is about how travel and restlessness wrench us and teach us about ourselves, how our losses compound our loves, and how endlessly absorbing the idea of home remains, particularly when we keep losing sight of it. Orbiting the globe, this collection narrates encounters in a transnational American's circuit. As much about Hong Kong as the west coast of the United States, it bundles transients and family, nature and city, the still point within and characters everywhere, to produce a fresh, ethnically inflected poetics.

Author City: SANTA BARBARA, CA USA

Shirley Geok-lin Lim was born in Malacca, Malaysia. Her Crossing the Peninsula won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize; she has published five volumes of poetry, including WALKING BACKWARDS (West End Press, 2010) and WHAT THE FORTUNE TELLER DIDN'T SAY (West End Press, 1998). She has also published three short story collections, two novels, and a memoir, Among the White Moon Faces, which received the American Book Award for nonfiction. She is professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.