Marisa Lin’s poetry chapbook Dream Elevator is a vivid and haunting exploration of identity.
To an immigrant girl growing up in the wintry plains of the Midwest, music was both escape and fantasy. My first loves were the Western classical greats: Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff. Then: Rock. Jazz. Gospel. Reggae. And of course, Taylor Swift. As a classically trained pianist, my younger self found respite from isolation and a portal into an alternate universe, one contained within me, that was as real as the grief I carried from my mother’s homeland. In this realm, I remembered myself: not a quiet, overlooked adolescent but an interpreter of sounds, wordless melodies. A language beneath language.
From this underground intuition emerges my debut poetry chapbook, DREAM ELEVATOR, which draws from my childhood in Rochester, Minnesota and traverses girlhood, displacement, identity, and generational ties through the eyes of an immigrant mother and her daughter. As music did for me, this collection depicts visions even while it paints reality—hence, the title’s pairing of the fantastical with the mundane: The elevator an everyday container, to be transcended by the imagination. I think of my mother, briefly trapped, rising at 5 am through the levels of an office building to her lab. What did she dream of? Meanwhile, find me at home, flipping through National Geographic magazines, touching the words my mother circled in blue ink, the ones she didn’t know. Of course, I knew what they meant. I suppose we both looked to language to save us.
But words can only take you so far. As the t-shirts of the local youth orchestra read, “Where words fail, music speaks.”[1]
Baby on a Plane – Chloe x Halle
Split into four sections (“floors”), DREAM ELEVATOR opens into the first with “Takeoff”: a woman with an infant, the mother watching from the plane window the clouds disappearing her country. In a previous version of this poem published in Five South, “the baby’s eyes are shut, as if she knows the severing of homeland is an operation one should not be awake for.” Throughout the flight, the infant alternates between sleep, fitful cries, and sleep.
In “Baby on a Plane,” Chloe x Halle sing with symphonic urgency, “Cry for me, baby, cry for us all.” Flying with an infant—particularly a restless one—is no doubt a stressful experience. But in this song, Chloe x Halle recasts this experience into one of shared grief, a vicarious outlet of sorrow, a cathartic surrender. “Baby, baby, I’ve been numb too long (Long) / Your cries, they hypnotize, they lead me home,” they sing. For my mother, flying away from everything familiar to her, I wonder where she believed my cries would lead.
You’re on your own kid – Taylor Swift
To grow up as a child of immigrants is to have your heart broken again and again. In an unfamiliar culture, I was on a relentless search for refuge—a friend, song, hiding place—somewhere to moor myself to. In “You’re on your own kid,” Taylor sings of young heartbreak. Oh, how disappointment topples the innocent. The chorus, “You’re on your own kid / you always will be” could have been the tagline for my youth—a complement to my poem, “To Make an American Daughter,” in which the daughter, raised by a mother who only knows how to abandon herself, finds herself simultaneously stretched and confined.
Secrets from a Girl (Who’s Seen it All) – Lorde
In a way, this chapbook is a collection of lessons for my younger self. The first: your name is sacred. And second: sacredness lives within you, not without. Each offering of girlhood— “sodden tissues, abandoned notebooks, photos of dogs up for adoption”— is evidence of spaciousness, not frivolity.
In the messiness of adolescence, Lorde’s voice is a salve. “Your dreams and inner visions, all your mystical ambitions / They won’t let you down,” she croons with the assurance of a fairy godmother backed by relaxed beats. And like any proper elder, she knows how to balance compassion with honesty: “The temperature is unbearable until you face it,” she counsels. The same could be said of the speaker’s inner selves in the third prose section—Daughter. PerfectStudent. QuietGirl. AsianKid—how they seem to multiply until she opens the portal, the one leading straight to herself.
Wondaland – Janelle Monae
The escapism of Janelle Monae’s “Wonderland,” is as magical as it is urgent. “Take me back to Wondaland / I gotta get back to Wondaland,” Monae’s alter ego android, Cindi, insists at funk tempo. The song is more than an upbeat proposal; rather, Cindi’s imprisonment in the Palace sharpens her desire for escape. Pair this song with “Flame,” a poem whose main text consists of three words: “Everything / Here / Is,” each with a footnote that descends into the subterranean world filled with “monsters whose favorite crayons you remember.” But beware: a dream is not without danger, especially ones birthed from power; “a country shining bright,” observes the speaker, “is burning something.”
Nocturne in B Major, Op. 62 No.1 – Frederic Chopin, performed by Ingrid Fliter
My first teachers in poetry were my longtime piano teachers Mrs. Rosanna Nuguid and her husband, Dr. Horacio Nuguid. Mrs. Nuguid taught me how to shape a line, a lyrical sensibility that I refined under Dr. Nuguid’s astute guidance. Chopin, wizard of emo classical music, was one of my favorites. His Nocturne in B Major, perfect for quiet evenings, is earnest, nostalgic, and ethereal, a vibe that captures the spirit of “Hiking with Mother, Meadow Trail,” a series of transformations; from light to flesh, exile to effigies, regeneration from decay: “Organs un- / beating, softening into the lint of flowers.”
I AM WOMAN – Emmy Meli
Emmy Meli’s “I AM WOMAN” is an unapologetic, liberatory anthem, making it sister to my poem, “Ode to Not Wearing a Bra (contrapuntal).” This piece went through several iterations, including when a fellow workshopper suggested I fashion the words into the shape of a bra—ushering in the contrapuntal form. Those who know me may know I have a mild obsession with contrapuntals; something about their symphonic complexity—their multi-voice depth, intellectual puzzle, intertwining narratives—intrigues me. And feels fitting, too, for womanhood.
Way Up – Jamila Woods
“I’m an alien from inner space,” Jamila Woods begins in her song, “Way Up,” one that depicts a dreamy, internal transcendence rendered from the solitude of her pillow. So too, my younger self peeks from behind a wall of duvet and senses phantoms swarming, ancestors with their “demands and devotions, pride and cautions” warning her of her growing illegibility in a new land. Her response? Go up. “She imagined herself an eagle, wings palming the wind,” reads the untitled opening of the second section. Majestic and unfettered, flying at such heights that, like Woods sings, only her true name could call her back.
[1] Hans Christen Andersen.
Marisa Lin was born in Quanzhou, China and grew up in Rochester, Minnesota. She is a 2023 Poetry & the Senses Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Cimarron Review, Porter House Review, The Racket, Poetry South, and elsewhere. She graduates with a Master’s Degree in Public Policy from UC Berkeley in 2024.