The Book of Motion: Poems

by Tung-Hui Hu

This debut collection explores memory, cities, motion. Tung-Hui Hu's tone has some of the swampy wit that recalls Calvino or A man swaps bodies with his lover; a mapmaker holds captive a city, which needs his crystal telescope to navigate through streets "unreadable as palm lines"; a car pushed off a cliff in a fit of anger becomes home for a school of fish. Anchored by the sequence "Elegies for self," Hu's poetry brings a quiet sophistication to syntax, diction, and form.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2003

About the author

Tung-Hui Hu is a poet and a media scholar. A former network engineer, Hu is interested in understanding the hidden mechanisms within digital culture, and imagining alternatives for its future. He is an associate professor of English at the University of Michigan, and his research has been featured on BBC Radio 4, CBS News, Boston Globe, and many other venues.

His new book is Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection, an exploration of burnout, isolation, and disempowerment in the digital underclass. Hu currently lives in Rome, where he is a 2022-23 Rome Prize Fellow in Literature at the American Academy in Rome.

Reviews

[Steve Sarrica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some excellent imagery and turns of phrase, melancholy and introspective, Tung-Hui Hu's The Book of Motion doesn't quite hang together for me. There is a lot going on here, but much of it is just out of arms reach, just beyond connecting. A worthy read, worth more struggle.

[Glenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tung-Hui’s poems combine startling imagery and the pricking of one’s conscience with an oblique sense of the absurd. There is haunting silence, tangible stillness, moments where the sense of possibility--that the world or we will change--is very near the surface. His poems place us where things transform; where there is no choice but to act, no matter the cost, lest we lose what is our essence.

His poems take daring diversions, both in the words and images he chooses and in the emotional import of the poems, and lead the reader, not by deception, but by revealing the multitude of angles through which we may view the world. The stutter steps of action in a poem like “The Siege,” where, like with a filmstrip missing frames, we are asked to glean fragments, and allow that they will lead to deep understanding as the circumstances in the poem rapidly change, only to settle with a power and moral force that belies the poem’s brevity. The poems are deceptively simple and plain-spoken, even as Tung-Hui’s metaphors are unique; never showy or overly ornamented, but continually expressing complexities in a compressed, evocative way.

Tung-Hui Hu’s poems point out the cracks and critical junctures of our natures, of our relation to nature, and our ability to repair or permanently damage both ourselves and the world we live in.

[Katie]

I don't do star rankings for friends' books (seems weird), but admire these poems for their beautifully distilled scenes.

[Angelina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning landscapes, magical imagery, refreshing look at the world with beautiful control.