In Taking Apart a Kaleidoscope

Book excerpt: When can you tell a book of poems is really working? For me, it's when the poems provide revolutions on themes--like the tiniest clink of a kaleidoscope. Look at how Adam Zhou recognizes what stays with us, how "the landscape will remain sullen / still dressed in a sullen light" and yet the people are always leaving and returning, wounded or memory or truly breathing, even in stillness. Zhou's lyrics are a personal history unfolding before us. In a world where poems can shatter us in the best way, In Taking Apart a Kaleidoscope reminds us that "there's something new if your heart hasn't stopped"--that we must dissect whatever comes up and hold it to light. --Carly Joy Miller In Taking Apart a Kaleidoscope is an arrangement of burning flowers. Adam Zhou has mastered the narrative of displacement. A world where people and objects are cloaked in words with multiple meanings. A house where "locks prefer not to accept keys." Through these poems a young speaker reconciles collisions of language, culture, and family. With great attention to craft, Zhou finds his voice in a fractured world. --"I'll collect the jagged pieces. Put them in a plastic bag." --Robert Carr Adam Zhou, a Chinese national, was born and raised in the Philippines. He won the Kathy Carlson and Emily Stauffer Award from Apogee, and was one of ten Asian American high school writers included in Hyphen magazine's Youth Poetry Folio for National Poetry Month in 2019. He is the founding editor of The McKinley Review, a literary journal based in the international community of the Philippines and focusing on the natural environment. When this collection is launched, Zhou will be a high school senior at the International School Manila.