Praise

“Year of the Cicada is a beautiful, wise, tender, and richly layered book, exploring Mei Mei Holland’s coming-of-age experiences in the shadow of her family’s legacy of suicide. As a multiracial Chinese woman, Holland meditates on themes of intergenerational inheritance, migration, loss, fear, and longing, as she also recounts the cycles of arrival, death, transformation, departure, and return of cicadas throughout her life. Year of the Cicada is a gorgeous and haunting woven tapestry of poetry and prose that traces one woman’s awakening to the dual legacies of absence and presence that have shaped her, and to the ways in which our bodies carry so much wisdom that with time makes itself known.”
—  Anne Liu Kellor, author of Heart Radical

“In this stunning collection which ribbons between lyrical prose and distilled poems like quiet glass bells, Mei-Mei Holland tenderly elucidates the experience of trying to find oneself within the spaces of intergenerational trauma and the power of legacy, especially while living in the liminal discomfort of mixed race embodiment. ‘Maybe I’ve remembered wrong. Maybe she did talk about you. Maybe she was talking about you all the time in a language I am only learning now to understand,’ Holland writes in Year of the Cicada, a stunning distillation of the grief and witness of family as it intersects with the loss of language. Holland writes of her own transformation through the extended metaphor of the cicada which holds symbolic weight in her journey, a powerfully rendered metamorphosis we are privileged enough to honor alongside her.”
—  Addie Tsai, author of Unwieldy Creatures

“Year of the Cicada is a hybrid work from a hybrid soul. Haunted by questions about her maternal grandmother, her family, and her heritage, Holland explores these mysteries alongside the miraculous life cycle of cicadas. In these pages, ‘a new dimension becomes visible,’ as the connections between strangers, lands, and insects are laid bare.”
—  Leanne Dunic, author of One and a Half of You