The Book of Motion

Distillate, metamorphic, these elegant poems by Tung-Hui Hu work magic on the page. In an age, too often, of surfeit and stall, they chart the deft alignments of silence and sublimity, minimal brush stroke and maximal wit, the deadpan ad-lib and the swerve of philosophic penetration. The Book of Motion is above all motion of mind: a joyous—and joy-engendering—debut.

* winner of the 2003 Kingsley Tufts Award *

A splendidly elegant work of poetry and prose.

* Trenton Times *

To read Tung-Hui Hu is to feel in the presence of a fresh, new voice. He's read his Tate and his Simic, absorbed their intelligent strangeness and humor, then with great brio and precision has discovered how to go his own way. The Book of Motion is an exciting debut.

* Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Different Hours *

The Book of Motion has a contained surreal style that deftly shapes a philosophical argument that somehow remains pure lyric.

Perplexity and wonder are integral parts of Tung-Hui Hu’s poetry, which is as elegant as it is surprising. . . . This aggregate of conflicting imagery is characteristic of the work throughout, which is haunting and mysterious, yet inexplicably vivid and tangible. . . . [An] intriguing debut collection.

* Rain Taxi *

Tung-Hui Hu's extraordinary The Book of Motion stuns by degrees. Here all is precarious, nothing is safe; yet awe and delight have not been banished. These poems earthquake the expected, creating a psychic and linguistic landscape that unsettles, jolts, and sears. A radio report is 'derailed by a news flash,' real estate agents stand 'armed with walkie-talkies barking at / half-finished meadows.' In a chess player's mind a waitress turns 'with slender legs into a heron.' Hallucinatory yet precisely anchored in the quotidian, these are deeply memorable poems.

* author of Black Series