Snow Flowers by Ling Ge (Anstruther Press chapbook, 2025)

Snow Flowers, an under-20 page but solidly stapled and exquisitely-designed debut chapbook by previously unknown-to-me writer Ling Ge, is a perfect argument for the need for chapbooks in today's poetic landscape. As both tasters for the poet's longer collections (past or future) and encapsulations of a particular vision, sequence or nexus, the chapbooks emerging from Anstruther Press (only 10 bucks!) feel as solid in the hand and the mind as trade books, but with far greater portability.

Ge's experimentations with sestina-style repetitions and Tang Dynasty forms, along with her precise haikus, ghazals and a pantoum offer a generous introduction to her tangible craft. A longer piece, "The Time Tunnel," presents a lunging syntax, featuring a "canola" landscape where "Red Guards" beat "goslings to death" and then the speaker, labelled "Capitalist" is eventually able to flee within the interstices of italicized questions concerning the value of coincidences. "Moonlit Night," in kin style, compresses the pain of immigration where in snowy Toronto, she comes to know of her grandfather's passing via the phone, "hearing snow's whispers/dissolving." Perhaps one of Ge's beautiful haikus thematizes this small and resonant assemblage most poignantly: "desolate dock/an old boat/boarded by wildflowers." 




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