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. 

Diana Cao is the author of the chapbook Relational. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She has received support from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Just Buffalo Literary Center.

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