Conversation Among Stones

Through fields of wild grass, restless seascapes, and cities tinged with sand, Willie Lin's debut collection of poetry questions what can remain and what must be pared away in our search for truth and identity. Conversation Among Stones speaks both to the inanimate—misremembered histories, photographs, the dead—and to the voices in our daily lives that reverberate with disagreement and confusion. Punctuated by doubt and resistant to easy transformations, these poems listen and revise. With striking restraint and simultaneous abundance, these poems attempt to reconcile the desire for answers with the necessity of not knowing.

Turn by turn, this collection catalogs moments of approach, fervor, and strife and carries us into a profound quest for understanding: “And that was one conviction: / that we must be to one another / what the world is not / to us.”

Praise for Conversation Among Stones

“Willie Lin's debut poetry collection is everything one wants from a collection whether it be a debut, sophomore, or late career poet's publication. Each poem—I mean each poem—is immediate, energetic, complex yet accessible, and masterfully composed. And I look forward to the next and next and next book.” —Martha Rhodes, author of The Thin Wall

“This marvelously ordered book by Willie Lin catalogs the ways and whys one comes to be. Her poems burrow slowly out of a fate irrevocable as ‘bees locked in amber,’ emerging hungry for self-imbued purpose, a task of a life that can be shared.” —Philip Matthews, author of Witch

“Willie Lin's poems offer us the twinnedness of could-be and might-have-been with is, the bewildering promises of religious practice, and the vital mystery of one's parents' early lives. These beautiful, solemn poems are radiant with the precision of Lin's language and the clarity of her images.” —Éireann Lorsung, author of The Century

“The quiet of Willie Lin’s poems is deceptive, masking a profound doubt that she wields like a gleaming knife. The doubt of memory, the doubt of love and knowledge, the doubt of the self, and above all, the doubt of language.” —Jennifer Chang, author of Some Say the Lark

“These poems rumble with light and shadow, certainty and smoke. They drift and flow, blossom and burn with ‘ghostly illuminations.’ I am struck by the force and breadth of her lyricism—and I am beyond grateful to share in their devotion: let us all ‘make something of suffering;’ let us all ‘rise, shrug off…form [and] imagine.’” —R.A. Villanueva, author of Reliquaria