Manatee Lagoon, Jenna Le’s third full-length poetry collection, is forthcoming from Acre Books on October 20, 2022, and is now available for preorder from:

University of Chicago Press
Amazon
Barnes and Noble

Advance Praise:

“Jenna Le’s poems navigate between science and imagination, political awareness and lyric timelessness, Vietnamese cultural heritage and American pop culture sensibility, traditionalist’s mastery of craft and rebel’s assaults on complacency. Frank and raw and smart and funny and enormously talented, Le is one of my favorite contemporary writers. A new book from this busy physician-poet is a cause for celebration.”
     —Julie Kane, author of Mothers of Ireland

“To wade into Jenna Le’s Manatee Lagoon is to happen upon the bioluminescence in a bloom of plankton in the darkest of times, when you can’t tell sea from night, when you need something bright and beautiful to show you a way out of drowning. With a lyricism that is sometimes the night-light you want, sometimes the lightning you deserve, Le masterfully weaves poems out of inherited forms and meters that are at once surgically precise and organically necessary. They will whistle you past the sickbed of American xenophobia, misogyny, and misanthropy and remind you that ‘In this new world, we must protect each other.’ Read this book as a light back into yourself and onto a world that threatens to stay dark.”
     —Matt W. Miller, author of Tender the River