Peach State by Adrienne Su
U of Pittsburgh Press, 2021
Peach State, Adrienne Su’s latest book of poems, is set in the suburban Atlanta of her youth in the 1970s. As a longtime Atlanta resident, I appreciate Su’s literary achievement not only because I’m a lover of poetry, but also because I’m a clandestine fan of my chosen home. We love to disparage our city as traffic-choked and bland. We might ask: Why would a respected poet set her bravura poetry collection in the unremarkable city of Atlanta (besides the fact that she lived there while growing up)? Adrienne Su convinces us in her ravishing verse that her experiences there, and the city itself, are filled with vitality of a specifically American kind—the immigrant experience that has shaped this country.
The collection is centered around the joys of eating and the idea that our lives are shaped by our early understanding of our place in our community. Transformed by Su’s radiant words, place after place and dish after dish appear to the reader in luminous yet everyday form. In “Lychee Express,” “Latin Club Always Had Pizza,” “Doughnuts,” “Wakefulness,” and other poems, the joy and pain of many immigrant families are told in ways that are universally appealing. In “Xiaolongbao,” Su takes us inside her own early connections to the tiny Chinese community in Atlanta during the 70s:
in my part of the West,
known as the South, there seemed to exist
only fifty Chinese, most with an engineer
at home, and no apparent ancestors.
Yet her affection for her strong ties to both cultures, Chinese and Southern, shines in all the poems, as when she defends her Southern background in “You’re from the South?”:
As if we had never joined the Union.
As if we had to go through Customswhen bringing Vidalia onions
to uncles and cousinsin the North, where Confucians
and their brethren flock for education.
In poem after poem, Su reveals the resourcefulness and happiness of the Chinese upbringing her parents gave her, in which popular American foods like hot dogs and packaged ramen noodles were forever connected to her childhood through their substitution for authentic Chinese ingredients that were not readily available in Atlanta back then. In “Egg Roll,” she confides, “There’s no such thing in China,” but then goes on to eulogize the egg roll as a Chinese-American staple:
The egg roll boasts of modest ingredients,
A deliberate lack of artistry, and the ability to travel
In a lunch pail in the back of a wagon, en routeTo its fortune, journeying away from the parent
Again and again, Su celebrates the authentic Chinese foods of her childhood and their descendants created in both the Atlanta Chinese restaurants of the time and her mother’s kitchen.
One of the charms of the book is that the suburban, unprestigious locations of Atlanta culture in Su’s recollections of the 1970s have become mainstays of the new, international city. Her depiction of these locales manages to capture their humble, local fame. In “Buford Highway,” she commemorates the richness of the area that has become the prime destination for Asian cuisine in Atlanta. Su offers the insight that the real core of her childhood was the weekly gathering of three generations of her family in the local restaurants: “What conjures our home is a seven-lane highway.” This description shows that although “Buford Highway” has the status of a Chinatown in older, more cosmopolitan cities, in Atlanta, the highway becomes affectionately linked with love. It’s an almost Wordsworthian transformation of an ordinary place—but with its distinctively American cast.
I should note that most of the poems employ prominent forms of rhyming, whether in simple couplets or more glamorous forms like villanelles and sestinas. But Su’s technical mastery never overwhelms the emotional beauty of the collection. And for Atlantans like me, there is an extra depth in seeing Su pay tribute to institutions that still define Atlanta: the midtown Krispy Kreme, Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, the Varsity diner, and even the notorious Stone Mountain with its Confederate monument. Su’s delicate and skilled rendering of the love and heartache involved in growing up Chinese-American in the South is an important contribution to the new American poetry.
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Kathryn Pratt Russell has published poems in Gargoyle, Black Warrior Review, Chelsea, Red Mountain Review, and elsewhere. Her essays and prose have appeared in journals including Studies in Romanticism, Disappointed Housewife, American Book Review, and Studies in English Literature. Her poetry chapbook, Raven Hotel, was published by Dancing Girl Press in July 2021. She teaches literature at Clayton State University outside of Atlanta.