Red Flower, White Flower - Tapa blanda

The poems in Red Flower, White Flower are lyric interviews with communion and solitude, nativity and immigration, generation and regeneration. Like a tree that bears both red and white fruit, the two flowers are grafted; their meanings grow from one tangled source. Influenced as much by children's fables and Chinese folktales as by metaphysical poets of the last few centuries, these poems cleave to multiplicity, hybridity, crossness, being dappled. At once elegy and introduction, they are the poems of an immigrant's descendant writing in the 21st century. These bilingual poems return lost baggage to lone travelers; they dwell in one homeland while always keeping other homelands in sight.

Jennifer Tseng's book The Man With My Face (AAWW, 2005) won the 2005 Asian American Writers' Workshop's National Poetry Manuscript Competition and a 2006 PEN American Center Open Book Award.