Review of Exiles Across Time by Hua Ai

Exiles Across Time, Hua Ai’s first book of poetry, is an ambitious debut in the best sense: formally self-conscious, politically urgent, and deeply rooted in myth. Structured across six “Echoes,” the collection mirrors its own title, framing exile not as a single event but as a condition that reverberates through memory, history, and imagination.

The opening Echo is mythic, invoking Lilith and re-casting her refusal into the register of feminist defiance. Hua’s poetic voice emerges here with sharp clarity, transforming inherited stories into weapons of renewal. This defiance reverberates through the later sequences, where images of war and trauma surface with equal intensity. Sarajevo, for example, becomes not only a geographic site but also a symbol of systemic violence and the persistence of collective wounds.

In the central Echoes, Hua turns to war and capitalist bondage, exposing how power sustains itself like a machine of self-absorption. These poems reverberate with both anger and analytical precision, refusing to separate feeling from critique. Hua writes as someone intent on naming the system that would erase her: “A WOMAN NAMES THE SYSTEM / AND IT LOSES ITS POWER.” Naming becomes both the strategy of survival and the poetry’s deepest act of resistance.

The later Echoes return to more intimate imagery: the lighthouse figured as a woman, exile as bodily hunger, survival as defiance. The refrain “Existence is a slit throat” is terrifying yet empowering, embodying both the vulnerability and the courage of persistence. Political critique and personal myth are not divided but braided together until they sing in one voice.

Overall, Exiles Across Time is ambitious because it seeks to hold myth, politics, and lived memory in the same poetic frame. Hua Ai writes with a fierce, unflinching voice that refuses silence and refuses erasure. The book does not merely describe exile; it invents a new poetic language for survival, binding myth and witness into a testament of resistance.

André Osório (Lisbon, 1998) is a Portuguese poet and editor. He studied Portuguese Studies at NOVA FCSH and holds a master’s in Literary Theory from the University of Lisbon, where he is pursuing doctoral research. His work appears in Folhas, Letras & Outros Ofícios, Porridge (London), Palavra Comum and elsewhere. Co-founder and co-editor of Lote magazine, he is the author of the poetry collections Observação da Gravidade (Guerra & Paz, 2020)—finalist for the Prémio Glória de Sant’Anna and semi-finalist for Prémio Oceanos—and Sala de Operações (Guerra & Paz, 2024). He has read at festivals and book fairs across Portugal.