A modern poetry anthology that includes the work of a second generation of Asian American poets. The poems lay a groundwork for readers while at the same time expanding the scope of American literature.

Taking its concept of concentricity from the eponymous Ralph Waldo Emerson essay, "Circle," the first collection from Victoria Chang, adopts the shape as a trope for gender, family, and history. These lyrical, narrative, and hybrid poems trace the spiral trajectory of womanhood and growth and plot the progression of self as it ebbs away from and returns to its roots in an Asian American family and context. Locating human desire within the helixes of politics, society, and war, Chang skillfully draws arcs between T ang Dynasty suicides and Alfred Hitchcock leading ladies, between the Hong Kong...