For more information on the published version, visit New England Review's Website. Substitutions was also featured as the daily poem on Poetry Daily, April 27, 2017: http://poems.com/poem.php?date=17284.

Su, Adrienne. Substitutions; That Almond Dessert. New England Review 38, no. 1 (2017): 86-87.

Adrienne Su shares what was behind the writing of the poems Substitutions and That Almond Dessert: “Substitutions” was prompted by my reading of Fuchsia Dunlop’s introduction to a recipe for Dan Dan Noodles in her Sichuan cookbook Land of Plenty— a beautiful evocation of street-vendor cooking. For me it merged with other memories of street vendors my parents have cited, as well as my experiences with street food as a foreign student in Shanghai, in an era surely now lost there, too. “That Almond Dessert” arose from my reading of Chinese-American cookbooks from the 1960s. Somewhere I stumbled across the name “Almond Junket” and found it irresistible. That sent me to the Joyce Chen Cook Book , which my mother used when I was a child, and which evoked a longing for Almond Float—although I wasn’t sure whether I actually longed for it or just wanted childhood back. Eventually I made a batch, then another and another. I still love it and consider it a partner for canned fruit, but I’d rather have it with canned lychees or longyan than fruit cocktail. (Excerpts taken from: Su, Adrienne, Behind the Byline, interview by Rick Barot, New England Review, May 17, 2017. http://www.nereview.com/?s=adrienne+su)

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