From From

"Where are you from …? No-where are you from from?" It's a question every Asian American gets asked-part of an incessant chorus saying you'll never belong here, you're a perpetual foreigner, you'll always be seen as an alien, an object, a threat. Monica Youn's From From brilliantly evokes the conflicted consciousness of deracination. If you have no core of "authenticity," no experience of your so-called homeland, how do you piece together an Asian American identity out of Westerners' ideas about Asians? Your sense of yourself is part stereotype, part aspiration, part guilt. To be "from from" is to be a citizen of unbelonging, a permanent resident of the liminal zone. From From is a staggering new work by a poet whose daring and inventive poems are among the most vital in contemporary literature.