Winner of the 2023 Juniper Prize for Poetry
"Crackling with the charge of the unsayable, Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive is a richly moving collection that unseams entanglements and griefs from a father’s pained correspondence. Tseng bends, warps, and undercuts the language of these letters to build a blooming and intimate work that evokes the distances and hauntings between us and our closest relations. Through Tseng’s arresting play of language, these poems enact a stunning dance of loss and retrieval, and of the many ways in which “a father never ends.”
- Jenny Xie, author of Eye Level and The Rupture Tense |
A kaleidoscopic book that performs grief's tireless and ambitious work, Jennifer Tseng's poems, aptly narrowed and scalpel-shaped, concussive with enjambment and hard stops, commit to the work of excavation and salvage--but do so via the heartbreaking and heartfilled collaboration with the dead and the ghosts that go on living in our words. A clear-eyed and courageous feat." - Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Time Is a Mother "Jennifer Tseng’s Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive braids silence and grief, intergenerational trauma and personal memory. These poems and hymns show the many faces of language, from what could have been to what is now possible. Tseng spares no words for the neglected plant which flowers anyway. The intimate letters from a father press firmly into the page, holding worlds of duty, alarm, failure, and unbearable love."
- E. J. Koh, author of The Liberators and The Magical Language of Others
"Jennifer Tseng’s Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive asks: what do we remember if we go further, and further still? Pulling from the exoskeleton of the speaker’s father’s letters, these poems worm their way through memory, language, childhood, and diaspora, creating new epistolary creatures: “Love rid itself / Then led me here.” Deeply intimate, these poems pulsate with grief and terror, as well as tenderness toward the healing self. Each fragment, each line break is gorgeously considered, as each ghost unfurls with complicated longing: “My ghost, my guessed. / Where are you, farther?” - Jane Wong, author of Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City and How Not to Be Afraid of Everything |