In Apparitions of Asia, Josephine Park explores “a literary intimacy between the United States and East Asia” (3) which spans more than a century. Ambitious and historically broad, Park's study is clearly written and animated throughout by her central idea that American Orientalism has intellectually motivated and formally inspired poets from Ezra Pound to Gary Snyder to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Earlier studies of US–East Asian artistic relations are of course plentiful, as Park herself acknowledges. But her book diverges from such investigations by focussing entirely on poetry and by tracing a genealogy from modernism to the Beats to a trio of Asian American poets (Lawson Fusao Inada, Cha and Myung Mi Kim) at work from the 1970s onwards.

In her first chapter, Park draws on a long tradition of Pound scholarship, particularly in relation to his use of Chinese cultural forms and his debt to Ernest Fenellosa. Chapter 2 reads Snyder against Pound through a thoughtful discussion of wider American literary uses of Zen philosophy and Snyder's rejection of Pound's Confucianism. Although this section feels fresher and more confident than the first chapter, Park stops short of critiquing either poet's position and more attention could have been paid to the paradoxes and impossibilities of much of what Pound and Snyder suggest. Alongside Inada, chapter 3 addresses such lesser-known Asian American poets as Sadakichi Hartmann and David Hsin-Fu Wand (who published as David Rafael Wang), and it works particularly well. Arguing that the Beats could appropriate East Asian poetic forms which were largely off-limits to Asian Americans, Park makes a strong, insightful comparison between Snyder and important founding figures in Asian American poetry, thus building successfully on the preceding chapter. In many ways, this is the best section of the book. The fourth chapter offers an interesting discussion of the entanglement between American foreign policy and military intervention in Korea, and the ways in which Korean American poets have claimed the United States.

Park's sheer enthusiasm for poetry illuminates her arguments and her close readings of individual poems are often engaging. But they could go even further. Indeed, the very sensitivity and attention to detail which characterize her elegant study mean that her voice can sometimes seem too tentative. Park also promises more than she delivers at times. She sets out to examine the ways in which Asian American poets have responded to the “onerous burden” represented by American Orientalism, but in chapters 3 and 4 this “burden” is not fully explained or substantiated. Similarly, when she makes the case for intertextuality – through the notion that Asian American poets cannot ignore the formal possibilities resulting from Pound's and Snyder's Orientalist experiments – fuller evidence for this could be cited. The extent to which this intertextual engagement is intentional on the part of either Cha or Kim also remains unclear. That said, poetry remains an underresearched area of Asian American literary studies, and Park's decision to examine, and celebrate, the impact of Orientalism – still a controversial subject in discussions of Asian American literature – on successive generations of American poets represents a noteworthy and welcome scholarly departure. This, then, is a valuable, and in many ways pioneering, contribution to a still-emerging field.