Border Vista
Anni Liu

Winner of the 2021 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize & A New York Times Best Poetry Book of 2022

Border Vista intimately narrates the experience of being undocumented, or precariously documented, in America. In poems that consider migration as an ongoing process rather than a finite event, Anni Liu writes exquisitely and on fear (useful and paranoid) and agency, loneliness, and the way the violence of the carceral state shapes our most intimate relationships to each other and to the land. As she does, she revisits moments of unexpected poignancy: searching for turtles in a drainage ditch, picking crabapples along a rural highway, smelling the namesake flower of her mother, who is half a world away.

"Inviting, dark and quiet, like a museum at night, the poems in Border Vista, by Anni Liu, are about change and transition, about memory (the noun, the keepsake) and remembering (the verb, the practice). They are also, always, highly attentive to language. . . Liu’s work often holds something in reserve, as dreams do, so that ‘astonishment of insight’ (as William Meredith put it) is especially striking when it arrives."—Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times Book Review

“In Anni Liu’s astonishing first book, we are witness to a wandering through all kinds of borders…”
—Ross Gay

“This is a masterful, singular debut.”
—Janine Joseph

Anni Liu was born in Xī’ān, Shǎnxī, (西安, 陕西) in the year of the goat. Her work is featured in Poetry, Ploughshares, Ecotone, and elsewhere. She lives in Minneapolis, where she edits fiction and nonfiction at Graywolf Press. 

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-545-1 / 82 pages / Poetry