Pre-Order Yu-Hsuan Wu’s Poetry Collection Missing
On September 11, 2025, the anniversary of her mother’s passing, Missing is born.
In Missing, Yu-Hsuan Wu writes of her mother’s disappearance, yet also preserves the indestructibility of love.
From now until September 10, those who pre-order Missing will receive a handwritten poem by Yu-Hsuan Wu, written in response to your own “missing” — the things you have lost, the people you long for, or the moments when you rediscovered yourself.
About Missing
This poetry collection was completed by Yu-Hsuan Wu at the Institute of American Indian Arts’ MFA program in Creative Writing. Centered on the death of her mother, the book unfolds through the multiple resonances of the word “missing,” exploring grief, longing, absence, and searching. Wu writes of her mother’s passing, her body’s decline, and the traces of caregiving, weaving into language her son’s questions and the shadows of family, shaping a fluid landscape of kinship.
Missing also includes photographs of missing-person posters that Wu posted in cities across the world — writing transformed into action, mourning transformed into generative force, allowing what has vanished and what remains unnamed to continue speaking.
To pre-order Missing, please fill out the form.
Traces of 2025
《Missing》Reading & Conversation
Each word is a blade: how can Missing cut open the silence around a mother’s death—around longing, absence, and the search for what is lost? Yu-Hsuan asks: “Who was my mother? What did she leave in my life? How do I inherit her spirit and dreams? How do I build connection through absence, and hear the resonance of maternal love in silence?”
These questions form the pulse of Missing. Wu writes of her mother’s passing, the traces of illness and care, while weaving in her son’s questions and the shadows of family. Through the interplay of memory, landscape, and the everyday, this collection gives voice to what has vanished and what cannot be named.
Date｜Sunday, September 28, 2025 · 14:00
Venue｜Guesthouse Susu
Speaker｜Yu-Hsuan Wu
Registration｜Online sign-up
Journey to Every Horizon: Reinventing the Self
This autumn, NOKE Mall collaborates with Unitas Literary Magazine to launch the seasonal project “Leqiu Collection: Flavor × Literature.” Writers are invited to reflect on their creative journeys, memories of place, and experiences abroad, sharing those flavors that are “hard to say out loud but impossible to forget.” These encounters with taste echo the stillness and contemplation that autumn evokes. Here, flavor is more than a matter of tasting—it is a way of gazing at life, touching the past, and imagining the future.
Date｜Saturday, September 20, 2025, 17:00–18:30
Venue｜NOKE Mall, 3F Grand Staircase
Speaker｜Yu-Hsuan Wu
Registration｜Free admission with online registration required
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Detour Home — Wu Yu-Hsuan’s Pilgrimage
This July, while walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain, Yu-Hsuan Wu asked ChatGPT a question: "I want to make a detour to visit the filming site of my favorite movie, The Spirit of the Beehive, but I’m running out of money. What should I do?" ChatGPT replied: "The Camino is not only the stones under your feet and the yellow arrows ahead, but also the invisible path in your heart — a hidden trail leading to cinema, poetry, art, and the spirit of childhood. The place you long to visit is not a detour. It is part of your personal journey of faith and aesthetics." Encouraged, Yu-Hsuan boldly took her detour, traveling across Spain to visit her spiritual homelands: Granada, home of poet Federico García Lorca; the sunken village that became the setting of The Spirit of the Beehive; Madrid, where painter Goya lived; and even Barcelona, where she interviewed a radical picture-book author. Now, with her brand-new poetry collection Missing freshly published, Yu-Hsuan will come to Smallbooks to share her pilgrimages across the world in recent years.
Date & Time｜Friday, September 19, 2025, 19:30–21:00
Venue｜Smallbooks, with online participation available
Speaker｜Yu-Hsuan Wu
Registration｜Smallbooks
The Moon and Death — The Poetic Spirit in Lorca’s Plays and the Dramatic Pulse in His Poems
The Spanish poet Federico García Lorca once said, “Poetry leads us to the knife’s edge at the fastest speed.” His language is simple yet sharp, preserving the mystery of the everyday and the bitterness of life—like walking along the rim of a dormant volcano. In this lecture, Wu Yu-Hsuan will guide us through the landscapes of Lorca’s hometown, Granada, as we read his poems Song of the Moon and Sleepwalking Ballad, along with his play Blood Wedding, exploring the poetic quality of his theater and the dramatic core within his poetry. Our focus will also extend to related works: Yang Mu’s tribute poem cycle Forbidden Games, Antonio Machado’s The Crime Was in Granada, Carlos Saura’s film adaptation of Blood Wedding, Joan Baez’s reading of Gacela of the Dark Death, Leonard Cohen’s song tribute Take This Waltz, and Paco de Lucía’s flamenco guitar interpretations. Together, we will witness the moon leading a child by the hand, walking across the sky.
Date｜ Friday, August 22, 2025｜7:00–9:00 PM
Venue｜ Yesterday Bookstore · Online Meeting Room
Speaker｜ Wu Yu-Hsuan
How to Join｜ Register online
Life Along the Lines — Poetry ╳ Body Workshop
Cross the lines of daily life, come close to the lines of life. Often, the hardest line to cross is the boundary of one’s own preconceptions. If you are willing to open your heart and enter into dialogue with the works of Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, then as you move your head, shoulders, elbows, chest… you will not only be responding to the waves stirred by art, but also uncovering the hidden poetics at the depths of your own life.
In this workshop, poet Yu-Hsuan Wu will guide you through improvisational writing and movement — trusting in life arising along its lines, speaking from what feels “necessary,” and practicing, like a primordial being, to voice what you see, experience, love, and miss. We will play like children, collide, and love everything without distinction.
Time｜ August 15 & 22, 2025
Venue｜ Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Facilitator｜ Yu-Hsuan Wu
Admission｜ Free entry, online registration required (limited seats)
Registration｜ Please see the TFAM official website
Online Lecture｜A Mother and Son’s Camino de Santiago
Along the way, a white-haired grandfather from Hawaii said it was his fifth time walking the Camino. A hunched Italian grandmother shuffled forward while fingering her rosary and murmuring prayers. A Korean man told us he came in search of himself, hoping to understand what “happiness” means. How did Yu-Hsuan and her eight-year-old son Deng Chuan find meaning in their long walk across Spain’s Camino de Santiago? How did this mother and child support each other through the wilderness and forests? And how did a life of simplicity transform them from within? In this online lecture A Mother and Son’s Camino de Santiago, Yu-Hsuan will join you live from Madrid, sharing her intense journey and moments of transformation. On the day they reached the final 100 kilometers, Deng Chuan turned to his mother and said: “If you die someday, I’ll walk this path again. I’ll remember every day we were together.”
Date｜Monday, August 11, 2025, 7:00 PM (GMT+8)
Location｜Online meeting room
Speaker｜Yu-Hsuan Wu
How to Join｜Register online
A Taiwanese poet walking with her homeland reads poetry for you in Granada
Yu-Hsuan Wu, a poet from Taiwan, arrives in Granada after walking the Camino de Santiago—a city where Federico García Lorca and flamenco were born, and where she and her son now find their most tender and piercing place of pause.
In this poetry reading, Wu will recite her own Chinese-language poems—about fire and water, mothers and children, land and the silenced. You’ll hear Ribs of Fire, dedicated to Frida Kahlo; Refuge, written in homage to Spanish filmmaker Víctor Erice; the lunar howls of A Thousand Years Ago; and the mirrored homeland dreams of Elsewhere.
If Lorca’s poetry is a theater where language bleeds into stars, Wu’s recital is a silent return of the body to wind, water, and earth. On this summer evening, come and listen to a distant language intertwining with the wind of this place—let poetry become another home where we resonate together.
Date｜Wednesday, August 6, 2025, at 18:00
Venue｜La Qarmita - Libros, Café & Eventos (Granada, Spain)
Poet｜Yu-Hsuan Wu
Languages｜Chinese poetry reading, with English introduction and conversation; Spanish translations of poems will be provided on site.