ALL WE ASK IS YOU TO BE HAPPY

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ISBN 9781938900310
Publication date: March 2020
52 Pages, 5.3” x 7”
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EXCERPT

from “Tropical Melancholy”As a child, I awoke before

everyone and ran towards Shanghai. My asthma clotted the sea

and nothingness trickled in the softness

of my gums. Tropical melancholy is the disease

that my great-grandfather died of in prison

while transcribing Qing dynasty texts until his palms became

tiny sites of dissent. I am not saying this is why

I believe in poetry, but I am indebted to the chance

of eternal return

or my crooked temporality.

PRAISE

“What does longing look like, across so much grief, loss, desire, language, and ‘clotted’ sea? Angie Sijun Lou’s All we ask is you to be happy is a startling, visceral collection dripping with raw eggs, yolky with ache. I kept returning to these poems, over and over, to be feverishly fed. Simultaneously lyrical and narrative, Lou’s poems are haunted with questions of intimacy, consumption, tenderness, connection, belonging, migration, and intergenerational trauma. Full of hybrid texts, prose poems, screenshots, redactions, and ghost interviews, these poems ‘live in the slippage’ of familial lineage. Lou writes playfully: ‘I pledge allegiance…. to the weird gap… between my two front teeth…’

What does it mean to be an immigrant daughter? What does it mean to be happy and for whom? All we ask is you to be happy asks us to linger in these layered questions and stir the broth of memory. For, aren’t we also ‘ghostslikemewholingerintheirdestiny’?”

– Jane Wong, author of OVERPOUR

AUTHOR

Angie Sijun Lou is from Seattle and Shanghai. She is a Kundiman Fellow in Fiction and a PhD student in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Cover illustration by Angie Sijun Lou.

DESIGNER

Book design by Betsy Medvedovsky.