“The river said, I’ve heard of boats
which are like doors to other rivers.”
And rivers, like ribbons of burning blue gossamer, transmute to threads, desirous with red. “In a swan boat”, Tseng sails the sumptuous seas of girlhood with tender sincerity and steers us with precision through doors — drawn like portals on water, flooded with light — which unshroud ever widening worlds. Like a fine needle, Tseng punctures into the plush underbelly of mundanity and ignites the lonesome, lugubrious landscapes of existentialism with artful imagination, playfulness, and humor. Tseng’s measured voice of exactitude rivets with a shrewd sense of observation that beats at the harp of heartstrings, and “Loving, like undoing a cord from the neck / of an angry goose”,
“The door opened and closed
like the skin of a ripened plum.”
Rebecca Pinwei Tseng (she/hers) is a Taiwanese American poet, teaching artist, and librarian-in-training at the Creative Arts Center in Jersey City. Rebecca holds an MFA from Columbia University, and her work can be found or is forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Chrysanthemum Taiwanese Poets Anthology, Honey Literary, and more. She received the Andrea Goff Memorial Prize for Poetry and was a 2025 finalist for the Wisconsin Poetry Series, Trio House Press Book Award, and Burnside Review Press Book Contest.