Birthstones in the Province of Mercy

Winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, a tender, yearning collection of poems that pieces together identity with the different shapes absence can take.

“Blurry eyes mean a longing for home,” writes Bo Hee Moon in her prize-winning collection, “but we’re unsure what home means.” A South Korean adoptee raised in the United States, the poet reaches for language to confront the complex, myriad emotions that accompany understanding identity and belonging after transnational, cross-cultural adoption.

Through verse both innocent and wise, the speaker searches for the memory of a birth mother who passed before they could reunite, aided only by “my birth chart” and “this tiny, / careful body you gave me.” To reimagine reunion, she creates a reality in which she can look into the “fragile depth” of her birth mother’s eyes, envision her parents meeting among spring azaleas and rice paddies, and gently cleanse her mother’s dying body. Transcending boundaries between generations, between life and death, she learns how to transform, how to forge an identity of her own, declaring, “I am changing, completely, / behind a rice paper door.” 

With poems that serve as our speaker’s “loyal companion // in the burnt / pine and dawn,” Birthstones in the Province of Mercy illuminates the language that nourishes the delicate and vital connection between an adoptee and her origins.