footprints
June 2025
footprints
$20.00
In stock
"footprints articulates a method: perhaps a methodology of refuge, perhaps one of resistance."
— Simon Shieh, author of Master
About the Book
Methodical, restrained, and intimate, Es Lv’s footprints is a space for accounts of worlds that have existed, for the rawness of the worlds we live in, and for worlds we can write into existence. The poems gather narrative, perception, imagination, and formal intricacy, exploring how their confluences might reframe each other. The collection embraces environments as holders of meaning and the wisdom of spaciousness.
Author
Es Lv
Es Lv’s poems are invitations to weave together, words into worlds, connections into ecosystems. Born into a Taiwan under martial law, they have lived many places and through various occupations. In art framing, in solidarity movements, in seasonal work, and many others. In their writing live those nested sensibilities, generative tensions, and the camaraderie. And much luck.
Praise
Shifting between personal and collective struggles, persistent inquiries, and the fragmented noise of modern life, Es Lv leads readers of
footprints through a “[w]orld of beginning and middle meanings” on paths scattered with ancestral palimpsest and through speculative diasporic spaces “where the borderline between facts and/Tales is not decisive,” not yet mapped. From questioning the roles of knowledge, memory, and our digital experiences to exploring nature’s quiet revolutions, the poet invites us to ponder slowly and look closely at intimate connections we forge with each other and our fast, ever-changing world.
— Soham Patel
From their perfect adjectives and positioning of silence, the images in Es Lv's
footprints cohere into gentle assertions—language moves forward (only) by way of all that’s left unsaid; in the morning it is history, not light, that spreads across the earth’s surface; history by which we recognize the sky at night—so clear and clearly experienced that each proposition feels not “comprehensible” to me, but called up from the core of a memory.
— Saretta Morgan
footprints articulates a method: perhaps a methodology of refuge, perhaps one of resistance. “Particular shatterings / willed into a rhythm.” Here, in “the dust of dust,” we find a language that bends space and time, deposited in the gap between subject and object.
footprints leaves its marks on the unconscious.
— Simon Shieh, author of Master
Es Lv’s
footprints exquisitely renders a world of beauty and anguish, in which “hawks ravens butterflies and humans sing in the dark.” These poems, “accurate and terrifying in skill,” offer a language that is both precise and expansive, capable of depicting the mind’s movements as well as the weather’s. Yet this is an art with a purpose, heeding Angela Davis’s call to “act as if it is possible to radically transform the world.” Es Lv’s poetry does just that, imagining “A world where to endure suffering is not a virtue.”
— Timothy Yu
In Es Lv’s
footprints, language makes its own shape in space and time: lines spiral back on themselves with recurrences of words and phrases, and words collide while sentences break apart. Es Lv’s language-crafted world is immersive and transfixing.
— Shawna Yang Ryan, author of Green Island
Excerpt
from “no one else can live my life”
Everything people say about owls is a lapse because everything they say
Comes from reading or hearsay but owls do not live in information or other
People, owls live in hollows inside this shell there is nothing
Inside this shell is nothing, all sound of ocean everything I say is
A lie because everything I say comes from the same source as what they say
I am disorder I am on the side of disorder, the theoretical end of entropy
Is uniformity everything I write is true because everything I write
Comes from my life that is a nontransferable path no one else can live it
Not any better or any worse lack of proof is the fatal flaw of
Retroactive manifestos I can know how things happen but never quite the
What or why in histories untended hedges straggly oleander bushes
…
Details
ISBN: 978-1-946433-95-4
Publication Date: June 1, 2025
