There are two menus in a Beijing restaurant, Rachel DeWoskin writes in the title poem, “the first of excess, / second, scarcity.” DeWoskin invites us into moments shaped by dualities, into spaces bordered by the language of her family (English) and that of her new country (Chinese), as well as the liminal spaces between youth and adulthood, safety and danger, humor and sorrow. This collection works by building and demolishing boundaries and binaries, sliding between their edges in movements that take us from the familiar to the strange and put us face-to-face with our assumptions and confusions. Through these complex and interwoven poems, we see how a self is never singular. Rather, it is made up of shifting—and sometimes colliding—parts. DeWoskin crosses back and forth, across languages and nations, between the divided parts in each of us, tracing overlaps and divergences. The limits and triumphs of translation, the slipperiness of relationships, and movements through land and language rise and fall together.

The poems in Two Menus offer insights into the layers of what it means to be human, to reconcile living as multiple selves. DeWoskin dives into the uncertain spaces, showing us how a life lived between walls is murky, strange, and immensely human. These poems ask us how to communicate across the boundaries that threaten to divide us, to measure and close the distance between who we are, were, and want to be. 

Rachel DeWoskin is on the core fiction faculty and is an affiliated faculty member of Jewish studies and East Asian studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of five novels, including the critically acclaimed Banshee, Someday We Will Fly, and Big Girl Small. Her essays, articles, and poems have appeared in a variety of outlets and anthologies, and her memoir, Foreign Babes in Beijing, has been published in six countries and is being developed as a television series. 
 

— Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition

— Suzanne Buffam, author of A Pillow Book

— Kirun Kapur, author of Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist

— Frederick Speers, author of So Far Afield

— Robert Pinsky, author of At the Foundling Hospital

— Newcity Lit

— Coachella Review