A Poet Longs for Home in “Entered Some Aliens” https://ift.tt/qStnkDT
“Grief is a god,” Siew Hii writes in their haunting collection of poems, Entered Some Aliens. Hii weaves together lyrical words with experimental style to pull readers on a journey through an aching internal landscape that asks us: What is home? Do we belong? And just who are we, anyway?
I’ll be honest. I’m not someone who typically browses the poetry section at the bookstore. I’m more likely to marvel at a poet’s wordsmithing from afar, privately intimidated by their ability to mold language into different shapes, and quietly worried that I won’t really “get it.” When I cracked open Entered Some Aliens, I was immediately drawn in. Hii’s ability to entwine detailed images with a meaningful experimental style feels like a hand reaching out, inviting readers to peek into the parts of life we all share, while taking us on a journey through lands unknown.
Hii’s poetry digs into the heart of their experiences growing up as a queer Asian American person in the South, their desire for home, for roots, and the othering, displaced behavior of the communities they grew up in. “The doctor heard what I did:,” they say in their poem, “My Family Tree Pines with Mispronunciation”: “Take your chink self, this virus back to China.” Their poems reflect a haunting desire for belonging that is backdropped by the subtle (and often not-so-subtle) strain of racism circling their life. They are an alien in a land that should feel like home.
More than just the way this book of poetry makes you ache, I was impressed by the clever way the poems were pieced together to create meaningful, thought-provoking dialogue in unspoken ways. “The Color Yellow,” for instance, touches on how Asian American families settled in the South; the poem uses quick, pointed lines to hint at a wealth of historical events until it turns into a series of highlights. “Highlight: shoplifting (pointless to call police if police are the ones shoplifting)” and “Highlight: sojourner syndrome (we never intended this staying)” are sharp lines on their own, using powerful language to create a strong image of hopelessness, of history, of lives deeply influenced by what came before.
The very next poem, “Porcelain Bowl of White and Blue as Vessel for My Envy,” narrows down the previous historical context and condenses it into the bones and body of an individual:
I want to be serene as the stripes of water, paper lanterns, inky tree limbs. I want to be a whole forest. Because the Trees in the South pollinated me.
I like to think there’s a reason these poems were situated side-by-side, like they were showing us a painting, then inviting us to lean in. It’s this artful structure, combined with the musical quality of each line, that turns this book of poetry from simply lovely to all-consuming.
As for experimental style, Hii pushes the boundaries of meaning-making by creating poems that challenge form and what it means to write a poem. “Parasitic Expressions” is a single paragraph that extends for three pages, in which the lines of the poem — about displacement in the world, queerness, identity — are broken up by forward slashes: “& she goes quiet to the boys-only school / & meets a quiet scholar / & I suppose our time with love is always lent.” Some poems include footnotes that dig deeper into an idea, or sound like a whisper on the fringes of louder words. There’s even a poem that’s fully redacted.
Hii has the remarkable ability to touch on the loneliest parts of the human condition, while at the same time crafting lifelines to a strongly felt interconnectedness. What’s more relatable than feeling unrelatable? Entered Some Aliens is disarming. It’s displacing. It reads you as much as you read it, and, in the shaky interim between worlds, shows that every traveler displaced in time, in place, in body, can find home.
Entered Some Aliens By Siew Hii The University of Wisconsin Press Published March 24, 2026
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