Slipstream, by Diana Cao Review by K.A. Vallere

Slipstream, by Diana Cao
“Where the Shard Becomes Seed”: Review by K.A. Vallere
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: August 2026
Page count: 81
ISBN: 978-1961209619

Seamus Heaney once described poetry as ‘divination,’ as ‘revelation of the self to the self,’ and as a kind of archaeological excavation in which ‘the buried shard’ matters alongside the buried city, and where the dig may produce finds that ‘end up being plants.’ Diana Cao’s Slipstream, winner of Tupelo Press’s 2024 Berkshire Prize, seems to begin from a similar faith in poetry’s power to recover what has been buried; yet Cao’s excavation is unmistakably contemporary. What lies beneath the surface of these poems is not only ancestral memory, migration, illness, and myth, but also pandemic consciousness, algorithmic life, digital exposure, family violence, erotic bewilderment, and the unstable weather of coming of age.

Still, Slipstream does not uncover stable relics. What Cao finds is alive, restless, and formally volatile: memory splinters, myths mutate, inherited forms become contemporary instruments, and the buried shard turns seedlike, unfinished, capable of further growth. The collection’s opening dedication, “to our stranger selves,” quietly anticipates this transformation. The self is not unearthed as something whole, intact, and waiting beneath the surface; it is encountered as something estranged, carried through parents, languages, histories, bodies, screens, and forms already in motion.

Reading Slipstream in a café, I found myself glancing up at a woman at the next table, struck by the persistent sense that I recognised her. Cao’s poems often produce this effect: not identification exactly, but a stranger form of kinship. Their specificity does not narrow them; it opens them. Recognition emerges through shifts in scale: an ordinary exchange opens onto bodily vulnerability, while childhood memory is interrupted by historical violence and literary quotation. The reader encounters gestures and intimate fears within circumstances that remain distinctly another person’s.

The first section grounds this movement in family history, migration, and loss. In “Every Day the World,” the world initially “arranges itself” through travel, food, language, and exchanges among the travellers, before the poem turns toward a medical crisis and the terrifying failure of the body. In “Rupture: 1969 | 2021 | 1984 | 1996 | —,” fragmentation becomes a principle of composition: the mother’s youth during the Cultural Revolution, anti-Asian violence, cognitive decline, migration, childhood memory, and racialised threat do not appear as a linear narrative but as discontinuous fragments. The disrupted structure enacts rather than merely describes the poem’s subject. Its visually dispersed stanzas sit beside a PRC propaganda slogan, the mention of Xiaojie Tan’s murder in Atlanta, an excerpt from Journey to the West, and a quotation from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. These materials do not explain one another; they interrupt and refract one another. Memory does not respect chronology, and the page does not pretend otherwise.

The poem’s conclusion is one of the collection’s most powerful acts of recovery: for a moment, the mother’s memory gathers the family back into itself, carrying their faces toward the “promise” of a freedom shadowed by disappearance. What might have been a poem of loss alone becomes something stranger: not restoration as cure, but restoration as a flicker of continuity inside rupture.

One of the collection’s central intelligences is Cao’s refusal to treat inheritance as either stable possession or decorative cultural layering. She does not place Greek myth, Chinese writing, recollections of childhood, and contemporary American life beside one another as ornaments of hybridity; she lets them interfere with, correct, and estrange each other. In “Legacy,” the speaker rejects the consolations of nostos, asking of Odysseus and the long journey: “what, / home?” The question cuts through any simple fantasy of return. In Cao’s hands, legacy is not a stepping stone toward arrival; it is the ground that falls away as the step is taken. This restlessness is where we find “our stranger selves”: not outside inheritance, but pulled by its currents.

At times, the accumulation of historical references, literary quotations, mythic figures, and abrupt shifts between intimate and public life risks overwhelming the reader. Yet in Cao’s best poems, that density gives formal expression to the pressure of inheritance: family memory, cultural history, and present experience arrive together, competing for attention rather than settling into a single narrative. Strict poetic forms become one way of containing these competing demands without reconciling them. “Sick Days: Sonnet Corona” makes repetition register illness, quarantine, memory, dread, and thought looping back upon itself. The corona form becomes both architecture and symptom. Rather than placing modern consciousness inside an antique container, Cao makes the form feel newly volatile, as if each repeated line were returning changed by what it has passed through. 

The second section captures the self in contemporary life: privacy policies, algorithms, bad news, romantic attachment, illness, and the speaker’s attempts to locate herself inside a world that keeps converting experience into information. “Privacy Policy” is especially important here because it extends the book’s concern with inheritance into the digital realm. The self is not only shaped by relationships, history, and myth; it is also extracted, verified, stored, averaged, and made legible by systems that pretend to ask for consent.

“Matter” lingers through its atmospheric evocation of a “car swerving / beneath the screaming stars,” where “The moon / is the sun and the clouds roll through / me.” 

“Sometimes you have to be still and suffer,” meanwhile, is blunt, morally uncomfortable, contemporary, and alive. Here, the Heaney frame of the dig is almost reversed: sometimes the speaker is not excavating so much as being dragged behind the shovel. Caregiving, resentment, terror, the feed of bad news, and the sick mother enter the poem without being softened into virtue. Cao’s honesty is bracing because it refuses abstraction. Suffering is not ennobled; it is endured, chased, resented, and still made into form.

The final section carries the reader toward myth, fable, friendship, insect life, and seed. The movement is more ethereal, but it is not escapist. By this point, the collection has made myth feel less like an elsewhere than a force at work within ordinary life. The moon, the cicada, the mantis, the butterfly, the moth, the road trip, the seed: each becomes part of the book’s larger meditation on the interplay of change, survival, and loss. In “A Guide to Seed Propagation in Hawai‘i,” Cao returns most explicitly to the patience implied by Heaney’s figure of the dig that becomes plant. The poem refuses the easy consolation of instruction: the speaker cannot promise that the “unexpected journey” will take root, only that waiting may still be “worth it,” “like the ripe fruit falling off / into your hands, when it’s ready.”

By the time the title poem closes the collection, its stillness feels earned. After a book filled with motion — migration, illness, myth, digital drift, fractured relationships, erotic bewilderment, and formal return — the speaker’s search for “the word still” is not a retreat from the slipstream but a refinement of attention within it. Cao’s poems suggest that the buried shard is not always found by arresting the current. Sometimes it is discovered by learning how to attend to what the current carries.

Diana Cao is the author of Slipstream (Tupelo Press, 2026), winner of the Berkshire Prize. She is also the author of the chapbook Relational (Sixth Finch, 2024). Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She has received support from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Just Buffalo Literary Center.

K.A. Vallere is a Polish writer working in English and the author of the forthcoming chapbook A Bad Woman Learns to Speak (dancing girl press). Her work spans poetry, hybrid forms, fiction, and literary criticism, and has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Superlative Literary Journal, Canyon Voices, and elsewhere. She completed the Undergraduate Diploma in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford with Distinction. More at www.kavallere.com.

28 October 2026