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Slipstream

The poems in Slipstream deal with the slippery concept of home, with robots and the internet and other human inventions, and with what we can learn from the natural world around us.

Winner of the Berkshire Prize, Slipstream is a bracing, intimate, and formally adventurous debut that moves with equal grace through personal memory, inherited history, myth, and the ambient technologies of contemporary life. Diana Cao’s poems braid ancient Chinese legend, family migration, illness, love, and grief with moon landers, algorithms, privacy policies, and online ritual, creating a lyric field where the ancestral and the digital speak fluently to one another. The book is formally restless and assured. Sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, fables, and linked sequences feel conversational rather than ornate, their intelligence worn lightly, their music precise and unforced. Throughout, Cao writes with a clarity that never flattens complexity: humor and vulnerability coexist with philosophical rigor. Tenderness is sharpened, not softened, by attention to politics, history, and care.

What emerges is a voice attuned to relational life in all its registers—daughterhood, friendship, desire, citizenship, species—asking how to live, love, and remain lucid inside systems that both sustain and estrange us. Slipstream is a book of uncommon range and emotional intelligence, one that feels fully of this moment while remaining in deep, living conversation with the past.

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Reviews

“In poems that stain the moon with shadows and ask “Who are you responsible for keeping alive?” Diana Cao brings forward an artful new collection that is both lyrical and urgent. These are finely made poems, and Slipstream is a notable debut by a formidable poet.”

Matthew Olzmann, author of Mezzanines and Constellation Route

“Diana Cao’s Slipstream is marvelously and expertly imagined, rendered, sculpted from every scale of life. Her speakers lament a humble discontinued soap and take comfort in the panorama of dead stars. A stepping stone disappears as soon as the step is taken, and days drag behind our speaker like a weighted blanket. Mothers are car thieves and terrors while fathers want to exit their own pasts and decisions. I can barely keep with the onslaught of arresting and fantastical imagery: A dawning in the two red eyes of a nocturnal insect. The compost of recently deceased for the orchard of Paradise, teeming with life. We move from Baltimore to Shanghai, from the underworld to a hospital. Truly, one of the most original minds I’ve seen at work in a long time.”

Megan Fernandes, author of I Do Everything I'm Told

“Diana Cao’s Slipstream is a beautiful book about home, a missing home, a shifting home, about language, the liminal spaces between language, the pandemic, family, love, and coming of age. The speaker in these poems is questioning in declaratives and questions, “healthily troubling” through life, a speaker of this decade—thoughtful, cynical but true, troubled yet hopeful. In these poems the speaker observes the world, passes people, as people pass other people. Formally astute, constantly querying and requerying, these poems are trying to make sense of a nonsensical world.”

Victoria Chang, author of Obit and With My Back to the World

“Diana Cao writes the kind of poetry in which the language embraces the world with craft and skill, the kind of poetry in which the relationship between line-break and sentence carries meanings of its own, the kind of poetry where the relationship between people comes more vividly via image and cadence. Which is to say: Diana Cao is a real poet, not just someone who has interesting things to say and so they arrange prose into line-breaks. Diana Cao says interesting things in a way that is memorable, she can shift tonalities so that the story goes deeper, she can repeat a line so that echo revels a new meaning. Which is to repeat: Diana Cao is a real poet. It is a joy to have this debut in my hands and to share it with you.”

Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

I
Every Day the World 3
Rupture: 1969 | 2021 | 1984 | 1996 | 5
The Arrival 8
Legacy 9
Old Dogs (Remember) 10
Sick Days: Sonnet Corona 11

II
Privacy Policy 23
Big History 24
Omens 25
The Reason 26
the algorithm moves toward an average 27
The trees are senescing, not dying. You’re dying. 28
Sestina 29
After 31
Refractory Period 33
Matter 34
Heart 35
Ordinary Trouble 36
Relational, or Instructions for Going On 38
Sometimes you have to be still and suffer, 41
Convergence 42

III
Insomnia 47
?? (The Moon Lady) 48
Turbulence 49
Intimacy 50
Patina 51
Love Poem for Brood X 52

Final Frontier 53
On April 29th, I try to be in the world 54
Love Poem for My Friends on a Road Trip to the End of the
World and Also the Beginning 55
St. Augustine 56
Mantis Marriage: A Fable 57
?? (The Butterfly Lovers) 58
Glossolalia 59
The Thing About Paradise 60

Appendix 61
A Guide to Seed Propagation in Hawai‘i 62
Slipstream 63

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