Reviewed by Manik Chaturmutha for Readers' Favorite

Jodi Lin’s The Tenderness of Glass is a collection of poetry and a hybrid narrative that weaves myth, memoir, and spiritual cosmology into a powerful exploration of trauma, survival, and transformation. Structured around the six Tibetan Buddhist Bardos, the book charts a journey through life, dreams, meditation, dying, luminosity, and becoming. It begins with invocations to Palden Lhamo, the wrathful goddess who becomes both protector and alter-ego, and moves through harrowing recollections of abuse, psychiatric hospitalization, and rebirth into queerness and chosen identity. Alongside personal histories of violence and resilience, Lin conjures up mythic reincarnations of Queen Búrté of Mongolia and Tibetan prophecy, collapsing history, ancestry, and speculative futures. The work pulses with tenderness and rage, exploring how memory and myth coalesce into survival strategies. At once deeply intimate and politically resonant, The Tenderness of Glass is a document of pain transmuted into poetic prophecy, offering readers both witness and vision. 

Jodi Lin’s The Tenderness of Glass refuses to separate the personal from the political, the mystical from the material. Starting with the powerful line, “Goddess! I call to you, and you intervene!”, the collection sits at the intersection of prayer and testimony, where myth meets real-life experience. It is more than just a retelling of trauma; it is a project that reclaims narrative, rewrites prophecy, and aims to build survival into the future. The structure emphasizes transition, impermanence, and transformation. Lin moves through each state with fluid shifts in voice, alternating between mythic epic, memoir, and lyric fragment. In the Bardo of Life, stark depictions of childhood abuse stand beside invocations of divine protectors: “Each one a map of my freedom,” the poet writes of tattoos, reclaiming marks of pain as emblems of survival. By The Bardo of Dreams, psychiatric hospitalization becomes both literal and metaphorical, a site where identity is pathologized yet also reshaped, where the “tender glass” of the title embodies both fragility and a luminous boundary. What makes this collection particularly vital is how it threads individual memory into larger histories of violence and commerce. Lin reframes personal abuse through cycles of empire and colonization: “A civilization built on blood / And commerce…Was mine / To have and to hold.” In doing so, the poems connect private wounds to systemic forces, patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism, insisting that survival is not only personal but collective and political. The collection does not seek comfort but transformation, offering a vision where poetry becomes both ritual and resistance. The Tenderness of Glass will resonate most with readers attuned to feminist, trans, and diasporic poetics, as well as with anyone drawn to writing that insists on survival as a form of prophecy. This book not only tells a story but also attempts to change the world through it.