"That English allows for metaphors of “sight” to so commonly signify “understanding” is a great shame of the language. Jessica Kim’s L(EYE)GHT is not only a reminder of that shame but also an indictment of it, an answer in verse to the speaker’s own wondering “if her optic nerves / lead to an inheritance”—yes, an inheritance Kim graciously lays bare in vivid poems of abundance. “The eye doctor shines / a light into my eyes and I’m afraid / he can trace the dream / I had last night.” Our tracing of that dream and mind is the gift this collection offers, knowledge that lies only outside the eye’s “facade of illusion.""
— ​Mario Chard, ​author of Land of Fire

"To renounce a language / that cannot differentiate mother from a body” is Kim’s attentive and careful work. L(EYE)GHT is populated by women who have survived the imperial violence that renders places like home illegible. Kim demands we see them—the daughters, mothers, and grandmothers. Wade into these poems (“summertime up to our waistlines”) with your hands out, ready to confront the ways we are “loved / and nothing more."
— C. T. Salazar, author of Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking

In L(EYE)GHT, Jessica Kim mines the senses, memory, and “muscle-movement of a mother tongue” to supplement her sight. Her poems engage rich, textured versions of herself in her umma’s language, the optometrist’s office with vitreous ghosts, and the supermarket’s labyrinth. These long-awaited debut poems shift easily with Kim’s curiosity, her reinventions of and experiences in changing environments making and remaking who she is becoming.
— Ashaki M. Jackson, author of LANGUAGE LESSON

As the world awakens from a year of isolation, many of us feel excited, refreshed, apprehensive, overwhelmed, lost. As youth, many of us are assimilating back into our school environment and building relationships with new and old friends. As residents of the greater Los Angeles region, we worry about the perpetuation of the pandemic, while also feeling hopeful of returning back to normalcy. We are interacting with our city again-the tables in restaurants are slowly being filled, the sculptures in museums are greeting their visitors, and downtown LA is slowly reincarnating into the hustle-bustle of a city we love. In this anthology, young writers from LA come together and write about LOS ANGELES. We write about the loud and the unheard, the dying and the birth, the static and the moving.

Made possible with support from the National YoungArts Foundation's microgrant and the Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate Program. 100% of proceeds will be donated to literary organizations in Los Angeles.

Contributors: Alejandra Medina, Alex Manebur, Althea Aguel, Audrey Sioeng, Cortunay Minor, Grace Holtzclaw, haley joy harris, Jolie Feld, Jordan Cutler-Tietjen, Jovana Tankou, Milissa Sutton, Nicole Chang, Rachel Alarcio, Shandela Contreras, Sofía Aguilar.