Kyle Liang’s full-length poetry collection, Good Son, encapsulates the “American-born Chinese” diaspora in 70 stunning, heart-rending pages. At its core bleeds a life deeply troubled by Western centrism and not-so-casual racism. Liang details both suppression and acceptance through the lens of a speaker born to immigrant parents in a deft collection that refuses to separate identities into boxes. Explorations of informed consent, the rash of anti-Asian hate crimes that followed COVID-19, and the mockery of speech and accents and social issues intertwine with staggering prose in poems about resilience—and love. What the speaker longs for most is for their heart “to be greedy again.” In these pages is the embodiment of that fathoms-deep exquisite longing for self.
