“These poems will stay with you across lifetimes, in the deepest layers of memory and the flowering folds of the future.”
remembering (y)our light: an illustrated poetry book by River 瑩瑩 Dandelion
Winner of 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers!
Poetry — 6 x 9 | 35 pp. | Full-color
Release date: October 2, 2023
ISBN 979-8-218-24922-9
remembering (y)our light, River 瑩瑩 Dandelion's debut poetry chapbook asks how we preserve intergenerational memory when the archives hold missing knowledge. In this collection, food lives as a conduit of memory, recipes hold ancestral wisdom, and poems become spells for safety. These poems honor matriarchs and elders who have lived through tumult and demonstrates how poetry can archive history. From Toisan to New York City, River's poems delve into how we cultivate care and safety within ourselves, each other, and in community. These pieces are testament to how we address and heal intergenerational wounds to remember who we and who we came here to be.
Check it out on: Goodreads | Lambda Literary Review
Praise for remembering (y)our light:
"River 瑩瑩 Dandelion's remembering (y)our light is a multi-layered and intimate song, honoring the intimate and vulnerable moments of care and connection for self, family and community. These poems are chosen kin, dreaming a path to a future where we 'sing away empire,' where we 'un-alone' and 'unabandoned' find a way to fly together."
— CHING-IN CHEN, author of The Heart's Traffic and recombinant
“River 瑩瑩 Dandelion’s remembering (y)our light is a much needed salve, a tremendous gift. The collection invites us to attune ourselves toward hope, joy, and communal care while also holding space for devastation and loss. I felt nurtured by these poems, by their food and love. The poems are brilliant reminders of the multiplicities we inhabit––within our bodies, places, histories, and languages. I love these poems of transformation, a reminder of our capacity for enormous generosity.”
— CATHY LINH CHE, Author of Split and An Asian American A to Z: A Children's Guide to Our History
"River 瑩瑩 Dandelion’s remembering (y)our light will awaken you into dreaming. These poems are medicinal and nourishing, full of visceral, herbaceous language: 'we listened with our mouths / open vermicelli dangling.' With Toisanese woven throughout with radical reclamation, River’s poems speak to resistance, queer and trans safety, historical reckonings, home and belonging, survival, oral histories, gardens, invocations, and songs for healing. Formally abundant with elegies of ancestral tenderness, generous pantoums, and heart-held recipes, remembering (y)our light was so familiar in my gurgling gut, as a Toisanese American poet myself... These poems will stay with you across lifetimes, in the deepest layers of memory and the flowering folds of the future.”
— JANE WONG, author of How to Not Be Afraid of Everything and Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City
Support Independent Bookstores:
remembering (y)our light is sold at Powell’s (Portland, OR), Bishop & Wilde Books (Portland, OR), WORD Bookstore (Jersey City, NJ), The Word is Change (Brooklyn, NY), The Ivy Bookshop (Baltimore, MD) and other independent bookstores across the U.S. It is archived by The University of Arizona Poetry Center and the Vermont Studio Center.