Gillian Sze’s latest collection, Quiet Night Think, takes its title from a famous poem by Li Bai. The first essay of this multi-genre work shares this title and focuses on Sze’s childhood obsession with understanding Li Bai’s poem, thus introducing many of topics this collection addresses—Chinese culture, language, translation, nostalgia, family—and setting the contemplative and introspective tone for the work.
Read MoreThe author has shared something with us so intimate that the reader feels as though they have walked into a moment they were not supposed to be privy to. The deliverance of this line holds so much weight — and as a diasporic person, it holds even more. The validation of this experience, one that many of the diaspora know deeply, is one that as a reader, I am grateful to have verbalized.
Read MoreParker’s clean and exacting writing, while excellent in her previous novels, soars to new heights in What We Both Know.
Read MoreTirelessly reckoning with the contradictions of living on occupied land, Phoebe Wang’s Waking Occupations aches towards a body that is unbounded by capitalistic notions of space and time. The poems in the collection examine what it means to recover a country that has already renounced you, and how to live within that doubleness.
Read MoreHow can you love a language you don’t remember, a city as full of ugliness as beauty, and a natural world that is in peril? How can you choose to honour parents who reject your dreams and seem to reject you in the process? In her debut collection, Pebble Swing, Isabella Wang accomplishes all this and much more by way of openness, observation and a unique delicacy.
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Despite the fact that one of the collection’s central themes is grief, the book does not feel heavy. Rather, the weightlessness with which Wani pens these poems is indicative of the many ways we do not realize how grief can exist in the small pockets of life, and how its constant distribution makes it manageable to carry after all. The ways Wani intertwines narratives of grief into love or into religion disrupts the narrative that grief is all-consuming in its negativity; rather, Wani appears to pose the question: how can we have grief without love?
Read MoreWritten in four movements, the poems take you from emotional exhaustion through to journeys of recovery and reflection. The collection divides its time contemplating the loss of a mother, the anatomy of breakups, and the nature of middle-age. Within these overarching themes is a narrator standing both within the experiences, as well as just off to the side, evaluating their meaning.
Read MoreThe poems in Anna Van Valkenburg’s debut poetry collection Queen and Carcass are self-contained: each one a seed-grain splitting open, or maybe an egg, revealing bent and twisted new bodies, wet with life-giving substance. There was an HBO show, Carnivale, which aired in the early 2000s and depicted the lives of various members of a travelling carnival in the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Queen and Carcass brings to mind the quirks, characters, and magico-bleak atmosphere of that HBO showcase of surreal gifts.
Read MoreVivek Shraya’s work of nonfiction, People Change, focuses on themes of reinvention, transformation, and the myriad of ways in which a person may be driven to and experience change. Shraya does not leave a single stone unturned. She draws attention to the many moments of change that one may encounter in their lifetime, and analyzes the value of this process for our self-betterment and fulfillment.
Read MoreA euphoric and euphonic ode to gardening, Sylvia Legris’s Garden Physic is a poetic tour de force that connects the passionate gardener to her ecological and linguistic milieus. The garden becomes a metaphor for our verbal habits, our lives and our loves, our ways of relating to one another and the living world we belong to.
Read MoreSheniz Janmohamed’s third collection of poetry titled, Reminders on the Path, expands upon existing themes of travel that occur both amidst nature, as well as close within ourselves.
Read MorePoetic associations of the sun are typically demonstrated as a source of joy, serotonin, and summer. Sarah Burgoyne’s poetry collection, Because the Sun, flips these motifs on their head, and imagines the sun as our universal source of strife.
Read MoreOver the course of the novel, Freya confronts and overcomes personal and familial hurdles, all the while sharing with the reader the different ways she connects with and finds comfort in her cultural background.
Read MoreCharlie Petch’s debut book, Why I Was Late, interrogates masculinity through the nuanced perspective of a transmasculine, disabled, musical, theatre, Star Wars-loving person.
Read MoreRadium Girl is filled with predators and misfits — and at its heart, is about women making bold choices to define what they are, what they want, and what they can become.
Read MoreIf one of the hardest parts of getting older is having people disappoint you, an even harder part is knowing that you will eventually disappoint them too. This disappointment of not living up to the promise of what other people, or even you, think you are is at the core of Casey Plett’s latest book, A Dream of a Woman.
Read MoreThe much-anticipated debut of award-winning poet Selina Boan, Undoing Hours weaves together themes of love, friendship, family, heartbreak, inheritance, the body, and time into (often formally inventive) narrative lyrics.
Read MoreAs its title suggests, We, Jane is not about one story or one woman, but the complex kaleidoscope that is the experience of womanhood and how that refracts off of the choices we make and the ones that make us.
Read MoreGrace Lau’s debut poetry collection The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak is sometimes casual, sometimes serious, and always conversational, but behind the accessible language and uncomplicated form lies a deep well of sentiment.
Read MoreSusan J. Atkinson’s historical poetry collection, The Marta Poems, documents with vivid grit the life of a Polish woman, Marta, displaced by World War II.
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