Ai’s debut chapbook is driven by an enterprising voice, and a new angle on age-old stories of birth, death, conflict and resilience. It opens with six short announcements or portents, called "Echoes," each in turn repeated in a longer-form poem – a neat example of form mirroring subject. What is remarkable about Ai’s work is her blend of contrasted conceits, political history, and mythic register, recalling elements from the work of Anna Akhmatova or Mahmoud Darwish.
Being an ESL poet, Ai’s language and syntax are reflective of the book’s thematic "exile," as the poems themselves bear the journey of translation. This journey is further contextualised in her Author’s Note, where she shares that, in her native language Mandarin, "meaning travels under the surface; readers are trusted to dive." Transposing a lyric convention from one language into another is not an easy feat, particularly where connotation and cultural context are inevitably lost in the move. Ai, however, is fearless and the confidence bears out in original, inventive poems.
The narrative focus in Exiles Across Time combines gothic and nature imagery, mythos, and symbolism in a way that rebuffs the confessional mode, or what Ai calls "English’s appetite for direct address." The chimeras of life, death and rebirth are corroborated by sweeping metaphors, such as, "History splits awake," "Ice breaks its winter silence," "Existence is a slit throat," and "In woods where history hangs itself." Here is a pastoral poetic that looks as much at destruction as creation – a fitting approach for a work that is concerned so much with exile.
From initial mythic imaginings of maternal sacrifice and patriarchal domination to a resurgence of hope amid the hunt, Ai turns sharply in "Echo III" to a bruising account of the siege of Sarajevo, illustrating a clear reality, even in ambitious metaphors. This is followed closely in "Echo IV" by a call to action – "a million fingers pull the tyrant down" – to the final "Echoes" of self-fashioning and reawakening. Through these works, Ai charts a journey that is intergenerational, international, and grounded in political upheaval and brutality. Exiles Across Time is an auspicious debut that favours promising work to come.
Éadaoín Lynch is an Irish writer & researcher based in Edinburgh. They are one of the Typewronger Writers-in-Residence for 2025, and co-editor of Re·creation: A Queer Poetry Anthology with Alycia Pirmohamed. Their poem "Brogue" was Commended for the Magma 2024 Poetry Competition by Raymond Antrobus. Fierce Scrow, their debut poetry pamphlet, launched in 2022 with Nine Pens Press.
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