Cold Thief Place
Cold Thief Place
Esther Lin
Winner of the 2023 Alice James Award
“The people inhabiting Esther Lin’s poems have been handed a map that details the path to the most splendid home. But the journey might be impossible. Though they travel with care and attention, though they find places to settle along the way, the subjects of Cold Thief Place keep searching for a place where there is comfort and restful love. These heartrending poems are full of grief and struggle, but they hold the spark of all the possibilities available in our most dearly-held dreams. A gorgeous and timely book.”
—Camille T. Dungy, author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden
March 2025
ISBN: 9781949944709
Available in both print and digital formats.
Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. She is the author of The Ghost Wife, winner of the 2017 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship. She was also a 2019–20 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, and a 2017–2019 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Currently she co-organizes the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers that they face in the literary community.
Additional Praise:
“Esther Lin’s Cold Thief Place is a stunner, filled with poems that are as poignant as they are defiant, as quietly mournful as they are thrillingly untamed. Lin is a major new talent, yet she sings—of family, of love, and of her life as an undocumented American—with all the wisdom and skill of a very old soul. This is a fabulous debut.”
—Patrick Phillips, author of Song of the Closing Doors and Elegy for a Broken Machine
"Esther Lin's Cold Thief Place is truly a once-in-a-lifetime revelation. I am changed, I am a better human being after reading these precise and poignant poems. This book is not only a timeless and necessary addition to immigrant literature around the world, but an automatic induction into the American canon."
—Javier Zamora, author of Unaccompanied and Solito: a Memoir
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