Book Review: Dream Elevator

Reviewed by Genevieve Hartman

A ruminant, impressionistic collection of poems exploring Asian female experience in America

Marisa Lin’s debut poetry chapbook, Dream Elevator, delves into the experiences of an Asian girl coming of age in Minnesota. Told mostly from the perspective of the daughter, with occasional poems in the voice of the mother, this collection ripples with ancestral haunting, with the intricacies of living in between multiple countries, and the grounding presence of the body.

Images of blood, churches, flight, and chrysanthamums populate these pages, while otherworldly abstractions and concrete poems broaden the boundaries of this collection. The poems often use enjambment to break one word into two, such as in this haiku: 

“Takeoff. Infant mum

-bling. Cloud swallowing a coast—

her prayer’s answer”

This technique allows the words to be read then reread and reimagined. Lin experiments with other techniques, form and placement on the page, to more deeply probe the hardships of immigration, how the challenges of being part of an othered identity impact mother and daughter. In “The Lin Family Goes to Mexico,” the speaker wonders, 

“How to render my mother comprehensible?

Something about motherhood,

womanhood, and

perpetual foreignness”

This honest if somewhat impersonal appraisal of the speaker’s mother provides a window into how the speaker sees her mother, with both the understanding of shared experience and the lack of knowledge that all children have about their parents. The poem goes on, “there we were—two others / othering one another in a country / that our country had othered.” The word play and irony capture how fraught the speaker’s position is, trying to navigate her relationship with her mother while each is caught in their own battle between clashing cultures and ideas. 

In addition to her exploration of the relationship between mother and daughter, the speaker is constantly interrogating the relationship she has with the place she lives, Minnesota. Frequent reference to the speaker’s position outside of whiteness and her struggle to make a space for herself encapsulate another main idea in the book.

For such a limited space, the poet tackles a wide swathe of ideas. In addition to pieces about the relationship between mother and daughter, and about being Asian in predominantly white spaces, poems touch on womanhood, on religion, on desire, on loss. The expansiveness of Lin’s scope, the unfocused, dreamlike-quality to the poems, while ambitious, may take away from the cohesiveness of the book as a whole. 

Despite this, Marisa Lin’s poems are expressive and searching, reaching toward a more perfect picture of what it could be like to belong, to find common ground, and to be known fully. This earnest debut channels abstraction and dreams to help us grasp the many complexities of family, race, gender, and identity.

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