What Li, the recipient of the inaugural Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize, does in his first collection is combine the excruciatingly personal with an essential oral history of China. The poet compounds words into feelings so readily familiar that by reading them one is immediately transposed to a different place and into a story. Each section of this dense but slim volume of narrative poems is introduced by a list of these word combinations--"the longdead," "the griefwall," "the springautumn,"--which are also displayed in ink-brushed characters to illustrate the intimate tone of a scroll being unfurled. Li's use of "the" indicates a collective ownership, though the memories are unique. These combinations only grow more complex and descriptive as Li recounts the generations that tended the family orange tree in times of abundant happiness and war-torn despair. Li's descriptions of unimaginable atrocities during the Japanese occupation of China are intense and unnerving, yet they are necessary and indelible. The poet's use of enlarged blank space embodies the loss of so many to such evil. Such suffering must not be forgotten. The Orange Tree is, simply put, transformative.