DREAM ELEVATOR

Kernpunkt Press, 2024

Employing visions, hauntings, and a dynamism of forms, DREAM ELEVATOR is an exploration of girlhood, displacement, and movement. The collection traces the trajectory of a daughter and mother from Quanzhou, China to the snowy plains of Rochester, Minnesota. Along the way, these poems traverse dreams and ancestors, silence and rupture, to examine the question: What happens when inheritance is not enough for survival?

Cover art: Salome Grasland

Publication date: March 12, 2024

In this stunning debut chapbook, Marisa Lin delivers a vision that transcends distance and memory to examine race, gender, daughterhood, and the body politic. Drawing from diasporic themes, Dream Elevator expertly braids surrealist elements as it moves through streams, juxtapositions, linguistic and nonlinguistic devices, “orphaned memories, loose curses, [and] wandering phantoms” to render images that are unflinching, dissonant and spellbinding. These poems are a testament to Lin’s remarkable control of language, and how so much is “changed in small spaces.”
- Aileen Cassinetto, Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow  

Marisa Lin’s DREAM ELEVATOR takes you on a journey. What a pleasure to see a poet play and dance with language, image, and form, to feel the inner music of a young woman exploring herself, her family, and her culture, and to hear the longing, beauty, and wisdom of her words. Her lines are resonant notes that echo in my soul long after the poem is gone. “How even in grief,” Lin writes, “they hear music.” Reading this collection feels like flying into a surreal, lovely dream. Dear reader, open these pages and find “that the ascent will set you free.”
- Ishle Yi Park, Author of Angel & Hannah
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Marisa Lin is a brave and beautiful writer. Lin writes with confidence, wit, and knowing. Her poetry sings—within these lines are stories and dreams, and the fragility and strength of memory. And like I do with poetry I love, I’ll be reading her words again and again. 
- Stephanie Han, Author of Swimming in Hong Kong

A tight collection of 34 pages of poetry, the chapbook is intent and unrelenting with its examination of the very real political issues that force movement, as well as the very real immigration story of Lin and her family from Quanzhou, China, to Southeastern Minnesota to Bay Area California. Yet, the collection also allows those issues and stories to transform into dream-like images and narratives, allowing Lin and us to view immigration, a topic as ancient and ever-present as trees, through a wildly imaginative, and thus, a wildingly telling lens.

- Nathan D. Metz, Heavy Feather Review