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Winner of the Berkshire Prize for Poetry
“I’m so glad that you will get to have the same experience I did—reading SLIPSTREAM for the first time and realizing, with a smile, that you’re in good hands. SLIPSTREAM moves effortlessly between so many registers – and is a beautiful and deft mix of tradition, structure and modernity. And you will learn about the connection between ancient Chinese tales and moon landers. Few books are this engaged with our daily interactions with robots. I love the way SLIPSTREAM both acknowledges the ubiquity of being online and reminds us just how dumb it all really is. Throughout this book, no matter what the subject, the language is elegant and straightforward and clear; in a word, it’s beautiful.
She has a way of writing about herself while using the language and worldview of the ancients. There’s even a sestina that’s actually good— we all know the form is too bossy and they never really work. But there’s a sestina here that’s loose with the rules, and so it flows; it’s a triumph.
Sestinas, Villanelles, a crown of sonnets, linked verse: the way the old forms are made to feel spoken and modern is a delight. This whole book is a delight. Even with the impressive range of subjects and positionally here, the book ends with a quiet intimacy that will have you sitting up and paying attention, sad to have it end.”
–Matthew Rohrer, judge for the 2024 Berkshire Prize
About the Author
Diana Cao's poetry and fiction have appeared in Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, The Yale Review, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. She has received support from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and she is Just Buffalo Literary Center's 2024 Poetry Fellow, selected by Megan Fernandes. Her debut collection, Slipstream, won the 2024 Berkshire Prize at Tupelo Press, selected by Matthew Rohrer. Her first chapbook, Relational, is available at sixthfinch.com/store.
Advanced Praise
Diana Cao writes the kind of poetry in which the language embraces the world with craft and skill, the kind of poetry in which the relationship between line-break and sentence carries meanings of its own, the kind of poetry where the relationship between people comes more vividly via image and cadence. Which is to say: Diana Cao is a real poet, not just someone who has interesting things to say and so they arrange prose into line-breaks. Diana Cao says interesting things in a way that is memorable, she can shift tonalities so that the story goes deeper, she can repeat a line so that echo revels a new meaning. Which is to repeat: Diana Cao is a real poet. It is a joy to have this debut in my hands and to share it with you.
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa
Diana Cao’s Slipstream is a beautiful book about home, a missing home, a shifting home, about language, the liminal spaces between language, the pandemic, family, love, and coming of age. The speaker in these poems is questioning in declaratives and questions, “healthily troubling” through life, a speaker of this decade—thoughtful, cynical but true, troubled yet hopeful. In these poems the speaker observes the world, passes people, as people pass other people. Formally astute, constantly querying and requerying, these poems are trying to make sense of a nonsensical world.
—Victoria Chang, author of Obit and With My Back to the World
Diana Cao’s Slipstream is marvelously and expertly imagined, rendered, sculpted from every scale of life. Her speakers lament a humble discontinued soap and take comfort in the panorama of dead stars. A stepping stone disappears as soon as the step is taken, and days drag behind our speaker like a weighted blanket. Mothers are car thieves and terrors while fathers want to exit their own pasts and decisions. I can barely keep up with the onslaught of arresting and fantastical imagery: A dawning in the two red eyes of a nocturnal insect. The compost of recently deceased for the orchard of Paradise, teeming with life. We move from Baltimore to Shanghai, from the underworld to a hospital. Truly, one of the most original minds I’ve seen at work in a long time.
—Megan Fernandes, author of I Do Everything I'm Told and Good Boys
In poems that stain the moon with shadows and ask “Who are you responsible for keeping alive?” Diana Cao brings forward an artful new collection that is both lyrical and urgent. These are finely made poems, and Slipstream is a notable debut by a formidable poet.
—Matthew Olzmann, author of Mezzanines and Constellation Route
Format: Paperback
Published: August 2026
ISBN: 9781961209619