I am delighted to introduce Esther Lin to Tupelo Quarterly readers. In Lin’s Folio of Poetry, a woman without documents contemplates how “her privileges / are meted out within the magic circle / of her husband’s beneficence.” This woman—appearing first as the poem’s speaker then later as a character addressed by other speakers—remains unnamed except her role as an unsatisfied “beneficiary,” a legal term for the recipient of benefits. She later wonders about the fate of “women / who choose not to marry” in their absence as she wanders within “the crypt of Saint-Denis,” which houses kings and queens resting their feet on little dogs. Lin explores the Syrian uncredited influences on the development of French Gothic architecture through the character of the Abbot Suger which parallels the woman-speaker’s ambivalence towards the value of her existence within the construction of the American family, and by extension the American dream.
Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. Her debut book Cold Thief Placeis the winner of the 2023 Alice James Award, and she is the co-editor of Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora (HarperCollins 2024). She was a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown; a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and was awarded a Pushcart in 2024. With Marcelo Hernandez Castillo and Janine Joseph, she co-organizes the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers that they face in the literary community.