Book Review

What this book cares about most:

• Asian Americans being made to feel invisible against pervasive whiteness. Erasure, reduction, and otherness. Personas, masking, and falsehood.
• Resisting the urge to become as small and quiet as possible.
• Internalized racism, assimilation, and disenfranchised grief.

Poems that moved me:

• “The Other Asian Girl”
• “My First Beet-Colored Pee”
• “Mail-Order Groom”
• “People Who Look Like You”

Lines that lingered:

• “Like any good girl, / I became good / at watching myself.”
• “A tall white man beside you makes you appear smaller than you are, so when you’re without him, you feel larger, your size again. This, too, is a kind of power: a shapeshifting.”
• “I watch a white person say white like a hole they must not fall into.”

Figurative language and formal feats:

• One metaphor extending across Replica is a dollhouse, introduced in the title poem wherein the speaker suggests “It is dangerous / to move furniture back & / forth so easily.” Low’s speakers are dolls, stand-ins, shadows, and replicas forced to live in inauthentic settings.
• Replica’s second section consists almost entirely of a single multipage prose poem, “People Who Look Like You,” which navigates the complexities of the Asian speaker’s marriage to a “tall white man”—a marriage full of love and respect, but not without its microaggressions, misunderstandings, and power dynamics. “That you must comfort a white man while protecting yourself is another day’s problem to solve.”

This book is in conversation with:

• Barbie Chang by Victoria Chang.
• Breakpoint by Betsy Aoki.
• How to Not Be Afraid of Everything by Jane Wong.
• Odes by Sharon Olds.

Questions this book made me ask:

• “White reader, see how much space you must leap over to see me?”
• A large portion of Replica is written in prose poems and free verse; how did these flexible forms support Low as she explored desires for boundlessness, wholeness, and freedom?

Who I would give this book to:

• Readers interested in relational dynamics, particularly within Asian-white couples.
• White readers compelled by perspectives which have not been softened for their comfort.