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In Racial Beings, Michelle N. Huang brings a feminist new materialist lens to bear on contemporary Asian American literature’s innovative play with discourses of science and technology. She argues that emerging from these works is a “molecular aesthetics”—formal experimentation that diminishes the boundaries of the human—which challenge the perception of racial identity as a trait of an individual human. Instead, molecular aesthetics reveals how race permeates the matter of the world. Reading works by authors such as Ruth Ozeki, Larissa Lai, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Julie Otsuka through the language of scientific discourses like quantum physics, genetic engineering, and elemental chemistry, Huang develops a synthetic reading practice which shows both that the nexus of race and science is not reducible to scientific racism and that science can provide an unlikely creative reservoir for Asian American writers and artists which allows us to imagine alternative ways of understanding racial being beyond the limits of the human individual.

Remembering Is Not Enough traces the emergence of a critical consciousness of the Korean War in American literature and culture over the past seventy-five years. A. J. Yumi Lee provides close readings of key texts from the post-Cold War era that remember and represent the “forgotten” Korean War, including Sook Nyul Choi’s Year of Impossible Goodbyes, Toni Morrison’s Home, Marie Myung-ok Lee’s The Evening Hero, and Paul Yoon’s Snow Hunters. She argues that rather than simply revisiting a known and settled history, contemporary Korean War literature is actively processing an unresolved conflict that is both past and not past.

Lee shows how literary works have challenged common understandings of the war as an American victory for freedom, from soldiering narratives that address the violence of U.S. imperialism to Korean diasporic novels that depict the surfacing of memory across generations. These examples ask readers to process, analyze, and critique as they remember, and Lee emphasizes that how and why we remember matters as much as what is being recalled.

Reflecting on the Korean War in new and often unexpected ways, Remembering Is Not Enough prompts us to reorient our memories, our storytelling, and our actions toward a more just and peaceful future.

A poetic reckoning with personal, political, and historical wounds

The titular “repair attempts” describes the words and actions people use to heal broken connections and de-escalate conflict. In his debut collection, Cameron Quan transforms this concept into a powerful lens for examining moral responsibility in contemporary America. Quan’s Repair Attempts navigates Asian American identity, American exceptionalism, patriarchal violence, grief, and the nature of apologies. The speakers grapple with transgression and healing from unexpected angles, asking what kind of repair is possible in a world marred by atrocities. These poems dance across landscapes—from an imagined American holiday of atonement to the pope’s apology to Indigenous peoples, from a mother preparing to flee domestic violence to an unsettling childhood game boys play with butterflies. A chorus of repair attempts that toggle between the personal and political, this collection invites us into difficult territory where failure, wrongdoing, and shame require a collective reckoning and a collective effort to be better.

Stand-up comedy, a celebrity non-apology, observations of racism, and the slipperiness of nostalgia underpin Replica. In poignant, witty poems, Lisa Low navigates the tensions of solidarity and hostility in white spaces as she sets out to write differently about race.

“The problem of being with a white man is also a problem of writing,” Low says in a prose poem that turns writing about identity on its head. She peers in from outside the poem, as if through an open ceiling. The poem itself becomes a site of investigation—a counterpoint to constricting narratives about Asian American identity—reimagined as a dollhouse, a stage with props, an image the speaker wears like a bodysuit. Replica asks what it means to represent yourself and your experiences in a world where you are indistinguishable from others.