2021 TLA Golden Book Award

About the Book
In this long-form poem, Lo Chih-Cheng uses lyrical innovation and experimentation to craft a singular experience that draws out the reader’s own memories. Through fusion, insinuation, and intentional obfuscation, the poem explores the uniquely intimate experience of reading poetry.

Judge Commentary (By Lee Kuei-Yun)
Lo maintains an ambitious thematic grandeur rare in contemporary literature, treating the whole collection as one poem, like a play written in verse. The work concerns life’s most profound motifs—the “thorny questions” on eternity and memory. Lo breaks away from all realist constructs to frame the Question of Life through fantasy and mystery, detailing subtle existential wrinkles and capturing the treasured relics that constitute a human life. He investigates questions on meaning—on the ephemeral versus the everlasting.

This collection engages with subjects that have long fascinated Lo, including interior dialogues and the “essence” of poetry itself. In one poem, Lo writes: “As though writing a poem / She says, luxuriating / Naming every thing and being / With irreplaceable words / The very act of “naming” bestows / Some shape, some form / And awakens their powers one by one.” The scene celebrates the luster of words after they have been polished and buffed; it is a poet’s affirmation of poetry’s magic.