footprints

Es Lv

POETRY  |  $20

May 2025
Read an 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

…

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.

About the Author

Es Lv’s poems are invitations to build together, connections and worlds. 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

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

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

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

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

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-946433-95-4
Trade Paperback
96 pp, 7.5 x 8.5 in
Publication Date: May 01 2025