AST MONTH, we posted a list of poetry recommendations for National Poetry Month, and the response was so positive we’ve decided to offer up more recommendations, this time in honor of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Orion’s poetry editor Camille Dungy and her community of writers are back with essential collections for your nightstand. Camille Dungy’s Five Recommended Poetry Collections: DMZ Colony by Don Mee Choi A bricolage of poetry, prose, real and imagined translations, photographs, memories, and hand-drawn overlapping circles, Don Mee Choi’s excavation of the lasting legacy of decades of war and occupation on the Korean peninsula is shot through with birds. I write of the landmass rather than the countries’ political designations because the line that differentiates the experiences of the people of North and South Korea is often muddy in Choi’s DMZ Colony (Wave Books). While she is walking in Missouri, a migration of snow geese passing overhead sets off the author’s vertigo and triggers her return to Seoul. We learn the circumstances that caused her family to have to flee—to have to, as her mother says, live “like birds”—and we read about people who could not escape, those who “had no place to land.” Choi’s 2020 National Book Award-winning DMZ Colony might not be the most obvious choice of books to recommend to Orion readers, given the fact that so much of the book is focused on very human concerns, but questions of migration, safety, and the impossibility of return are universal. Choi dedicates this book to “all the birds and children in flight,” and her work is a stirring and necessary witness to the realities of this inextricably connected world.