* * *

Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965 | Timothy Yu | Stanford University Press (2009)

Recommended by Mia: “This is one of the key critical texts on my reading list for the holidays.  I’ve only skimmed the first few chapters, but thus far have found Yu’s argument compelling, his analysis rigorous, and his wide-ranging knowledge of Asian American and Language poetry in the United States to be informative to my own work—not to mention useful in historicizing these two movements/moments in contemporary poetry!

From the Tinfish Editors’ Blog: ‘Using a definition of the avant-garde that has less to do with aesthetics than with social groups composed of like-minded artists, Yu argues that Asian American poetry and Language writing formed parallel movements in the 1970s. [...] Both presented themselves in opposition to the mainstream; both were marked by questions of form and racial identity. Both meant to create art out of social groups, and reconstitute the social through the reception of their art.’”

* * *

Radiant Silhouette: New & Selected Work 1974-1988 | John Yau | Black Sparrow Press (1989)

Recommended by Mia: “Yau is one of the two major poets that Timothy Yu addresses in Race and the Avant-Garde (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is the other), so I’ve been reading through his New & Selected Work for an introduction to the thematic and aesthetic scope of his early career.  He’s a fascinating figure in Asian American poetry and, as Yu points out, ‘might best be read as a restoration of the links between politics, form, and race that characterize the avant-garde Asian American poetry of the 1970s [... providing] the first opportunity for most readers to recognize [...] the presence of that avant-garde back into the very origins of Asian American writing.’”

* * *

Man on Extremely Small Island | Jason Koo | C&R Press (2009)

Recommended by Iris: “Jason Koo’s style is very different from my own, but this book (his first collection) managed to completely charm me with its quirkiness.  The voice of the book’s primary speaker manifests a world-weary exhaustion that is, on the surface, darkly melancholic and painfully self-deprecating.  He obsesses over his dirty apartment while eating a tuna sandwich, dreams about floundering clumsily through an encounter with Lucy Liu, envisions himself stranded on an island in the middle of an ocean, worrying about the size of his nose.  But beneath the speaker’s (at times endearingly hyperbolic) self-consciousness lies a striking vulnerability and a luminous ability to evoke the fantastic within the mundane: BBQ chip crumbs echo the ‘fine grains / of my slovenliness,’ becoming ‘barbecue pollen,’ and later, ‘orange microbes’ (9); Lucy Liu becomes a motherly goddess figure who guides him through a secret mission, ‘pulling you after her diving into the stage,’ which becomes the arena for an undersea showdown complete with battleships, lingerie models, and harpoons (22) , the island transforms into the kneecap of a giant woman who ‘has no nose. Just a space where mine / can fit’ (77). Part Frank O’Hara, part tragic hero of his own sardonic comic-book series, the speaker’s sense of humor, whimsy, and wonder, as transmitted by Koo’s craft, paint a picture of a world that reinvisions the now-archetypal image behind John Donne’s famous ‘No man is an island’ with simultaneous irreverence and tenderness. ”

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Beasts for the Chase | Monica Ferrell | Sarabande Books (2008)

Recommended by Iris: “Possibly one of the most beautiful collections that I have read this year.  Along with the beautifully strange and grotesque figurations of the body that occur in Kimiko Hahn’s The Artist’s Daughter, Ferrell’s gorgeously ornate (but never stiff) renderings of mythological and literary figures have caused me to look more closely at my own craft, to think more minutely and intensely about the intricacies of shape, texture, and fluid—the body as shapeshifting tableau, rendered intricately and forcefully (even animalistically, at times) on the page.”

* * *

The Elephant’s Journey | José Saramago (Trans. Margaret Jull Costa) | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2010)

Recommended by Monica: “This is the first Saramago book I’ve read and I hope you, like me, find and read everything you can by him. The Elephant’s Journey is apparently a work of historical fiction but it also lives in the interstices of other genres such as fable, socio-political commentary, philosophy, and gentle comedy. An Indian elephant, gifted to the king of Portugal by Goa, is re-gifted to the archduke of Austria. How he makes his journey across 16th c. Europe with his mahout is basically the plot, and there’s not much to it. It is Saramago’s narrative strategies, such as the artifice of orality, defocalization, polyvocality, and digressions, that give the book its force.”

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The Road to Wanting | Wendy Law-Yone | Chatto & Windus (2010)

Recommended by Simone: “It begins with a suicide and a comedy of errors, wrought with the dark humor leftover in ordinary people’s minds in a former British colony. Although the town of Wanting and the Wild Lu tribe which feed this novel’s plot are the author’s inventions, Burma (her birthplace) and its complex human dramas are very real. The principle character, Na Ga, illuminates the stark reality of what Nobel Laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi once referred to as a ‘Fascist Disneyland.’ Na Ga’s story gives voice to the country’s ethnic minorities and reveals a more intricate portrait of Burma through her own longing, displacement and growth. Throughout her tumultuous journey, Na Ga seeks to discover what–and where–’home’ truly is.”

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Break Every Rule: Essays on Language, Longing, and Moments of Desire | Carole Maso | Counterpoint (2000)

Recommended by Kelsay: “I find Maso’s short collection of essays to be incredibly inspiring for the lyric artist in any genre. In this book, she elevates the act of writing about writing to poetry because she’s not afraid to interrogate the task of a lyricist, especially a lyrical writer of prose, while making love to language itself in each essay.”

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Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation | Jeff Chang | Picador (2005)

Recommended by Kelsay: “When asked what basic idea he wanted readers to walk away with this past November in a lecture on Can’t Stop Won’t Stop at Saint Mary’s College of California, Jeff Chang said: ‘That hip-hop is a worldview.’ Even more than a history of the music that made his generation, his book is a story of generations, political ideologies, history, culture and the worldview of the people participating in the grassroots movement over the past thirty years.  ”

* * *

And don’t forget the following books—all of which we’ve reviewed and/or featured in the last year—either:

Poetry

• Water the Moon by Fiona Sze-Lorrain (reviewed in this post by Supriya Misra)
• Insides She Swallowed by Sasha Pimental Chacón (reviewed in this post by Supriya Misra)
• from unincorporated territory [hacha] and from unincorporated territory [saina] by Craig Santos Perez (as featured in this interview with him)
• Why is the Edge Always Windy? by M0ng-Lan (as featured in this guest post by Stephen H. Sohn and this interview with her)
• In the Mynah Bird’s Own Words by Barbara Tran (as featured in this guest post about Tupelo, by Stephen H. Sohn)
• Ardor by Karen An-hwei Lee (as featured in this guest post about Tupelo, by Stephen H. Sohn)
• At the Drive-In Volcano and Miracle Fruit by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (as featured in this guest post about Tupelo, by Stephen H. Sohn)
• Ignatz by Monica Youn (reviewed in this post by Supriya Misra)
• Requiem for the Orchard by Oliver de la Paz (reviewed in this post by Supriya Misra)
• Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (featured over the course of two months: part 1 and part 2)
• Each Crumbling House by Melody Gee (reviewed in this post by Henry W. Leung)
• The Half-Inch Himalayas by Agha Shahid Ali (as featured in this post by Mrigaa Sethi)
• 100 Poems by S S Prasad (reviewed in this post by Monica Mody)
• Adamantine by Shin Yu Pai (reviewed in this guest post by Stephen H. Sohn)
• The Mental Life of Cities by Eddie Tay (reviewed in this post by Henry W. Leung)
• Diwata by Barbara Jane Reyes (reviewed in this post by Monica Mody)
• Burnings by Ocean Vuong (reviewed in this post by Kevin Minh Allen)

Prose

• I Love You’s Are For White People by Lac Su (reviewed in this post by Ly Chheng)
• I-Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita (reviewed in this post by Ly Chheng

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Please help support the work of small presses and Asian American writers this season.  What’s on your holiday reading or gift list this year? Leave us a note in the comments to share your favorite titles from 2010.

Let’s dive straight in, examining three of the issue’s first poems and their wrestle with words and meanings.

Phill Provance’s interlace poem “St. Petersburg Has Many Churches,” is perhaps the most abstruse, though its diction remains commonplace. The poem’s charm lies not in its form but in its unself-conscious vernacular. Its colloquial voice, inconsistent in a way typical to modern speech, uses contractions here but not there, and lumbers along monosyllabic platforms (many its, thats, and ises). The loftiest word is “ellipticizing,” but this neologism, rather than conjugating the Latinate directly (“ellipsing”), invokes the urban by conjugating gym ellipticals as root. All this results in the naturalization of the poem’s anfractuous form, such that it flows with incidental ease. This is hard to achieve. Provance himself comments that the poem is designed to be accessible despite its layered meanings, which makes it an appropriate gateway poem to the journal. Yet: why is a poem about St. Petersburg, or his second poem remembering lost love, placed as the opening of an “Asian Literary Journal”? The third stanza of “St. Petersburg” describes a vaguely Zen mode of seeing, but the other poem has nothing culturally comparable. We’ll return to this.

Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s “A Talk With Mao Tze-tung,” though also colloquial, achieves a much steadier voice. This poem addresses the quondam Chairman’s mortal absence, because “you are nowhere / until a Swedish journalist recites your poetry / and wonders . . .” Living, and dead, and revived, Mao’s core vitality resides in his words and ideas, which become corporeal by revolutions. Thoughts march, words poison, books are buried. And along the way, vituperation must question itself: “why am I talking to you, dead man?” It seems language persists even when we don’t desire it, and since “history has no last word,” this poem ends in questions, and the talk with Mao must pause until an answer comes alive again.

Kim-An Lieberman’s two poems are among my favorites for their adroitness. “After Ten Years,” a loose-octameter poem, turns list into narrative. The “Because” reiteration chants and expiates, swelling to crescendo; the final line hits the kind of poetic denouement that evokes quiet “hm”s from audiences at readings. In “Harvest,” we begin in miniatures (“single beads, stray buttons, broken twigs”) and end in nature’s enormity. The sound of children’s jubilance masks the tone and the suffocating fish onshore, until the ending when the ominous “sudden true hand” comes forth unveiled. Lieberman distinguishes herself in poetic brevity with truncated phrases like “This is not to sing / a strange-eyed child, some oracular pure . . .” and doesn’t sacrifice clarity for linguistic decoration, or vice versa.

* * *

Thematic Curiosities

Most of the poems in this issue fit the “Asian” label easily enough, apprehending in some way the international context of culture. An obvious example features the tourist/outsider as observer. Helle Annette Slutz’s “Another City Which You Leave” triptych takes us through a foreigner’ travels through China: Turfan (mistakenly naming the Mogao caves instead of the Bezeklik caves?), Beijing, and Shanghai. In the first, she vivifies statues as only an outsider’s imagination can: “I watch them unbutton, untie, de-robe / and fold emerald silks and saffron cottons into stone.” This is used to great poetic effect, though the same turn of vision comes cheaply when she concludes self-consciously as a poet writing this poem. Peters Bruveris’s “Notes from Travels in China, I” and Xu Zhimo’s “Farewell River Cam” are two more evidently outsider poems, to which I’ll return when discussing translations.

Other “Asian” poems take Chinese places as their subject. W.F. Lantry’s “Rainbow Bridge” is a kind of translation, deriving from a Song Dynasty scroll painting that, in this case, is evidence of a woven bridge having existed in antiquity. Lantry wonderfully demonstrates the limitations of visual art without language; his poem verb-alizes the painting, not only exalting in the details but animating them and, in the process, expounding instructions to build such a bridge. The attention to detail would be prolix if not for the enjambment and inconsistent rhymes. Another poem, Steven Schroeder’s “You Can Smell Roads,” situates itself in Shenzhen (according to Reid Mitchell’s review), and execrates the urban displacing the rural. Formally it’s pleasant, the first sentence flowing across three stanzas, and the title line melodizing: “you can smell roads / where rivers ran.” But the conclusion is a blunt judgment, and neglects the mixed cultural connotations in “a young city growing old”—as if to age were simply to lose moral innocence.

The poems that don’t immediately fit any distinct cultural categories include Provance’s two poems, Annie Zaidi’s “Diaphragm,” and Marco Yan’s “Remembrance.” Not that an Asian journal has to meet presuppositions about content—but Cha’s self-applied category invites scrutiny. Provance’s “What I Said To Her Was Not A Lie” is an anonymized lost-love poem with no distinguishing context in race, culture, locality, or language. Zaidi’s “Diaphragm” is a heuristic exploration of closeness between lovers. Yan’s “Remembrance” meditates on the lingering destination of breaths belonging to someone deceased or gone away. What pattern emerges from these three apparently inapposite poems? The body. “Diaphragm” touches on this from the start: “If a lover wants to be / close, closer / than skin . . .” Poetry’s bottom line is always a discourse of human language; even if we regard it only linguistically or dialectically, situated between the formally written and the colloquially spoken, we cannot forget the role the body plays. Especially in a sometimes bilingual journal, the body communicates as universally as narrative.

* * *

Translation

I laud Cha for being international and diglossic, because the presence—or shadow—of other languages encourages us to confront our own more objectively. One poem in this issue is bilingual, and three are translations (I include “Rainbow Bridge,” tentatively). This is atypical of most literary journals, and for that reason, reading Cha is a great privilege.

Eddie Tay’s “Cities” features an alternating refrain in Traditional Chinese. The footnotes have the translations reversed, a typographical curiosity that turns the Chinese into interjections rather than responses to preceding lines. Read properly, they function as an embedded inner monologue, as though the English were the ego’s narration and the Chinese the superego’s mantra. It isn’t common to see two languages interchanged effectively in poems; one usually commands the other, or the first remedies the second’s insufficiency. In Tay’s poem, disparate languages enter equally from different facets of a single mind. Were the syntax of the lines not interlaced and the first not repeated, the Chinese would be a distraction from the poem. Instead, it holds the poem’s sentiment—disappointed change and resolve—together.

Bruveris’s “Notes from Travels in China, I” is translated by Inara Cedrins. The linguistic transitions are impressive: its short, trailing lines and unconnected stanzas are a fine attempt at a haiku spirit written into (vaguely Chinese) couplets, written in Latvian and translated into English. But the title foretells the poem’s major flaw: garrulous and sprawling in statement, it reads like fragments from a sentimentalist’s journal more than a unified poem. It fails to achieve the ecstatic vision of short image-lines; the narration, self-consciousness, and hodgepodge of articles and prepositions are all supererogatory. For example, “in evening twilight” starts with an unneeded preposition, then iterates the same time of day twice; just “twilight” suffices for the line. But the couplets in the third-from-last section are the strongest, pared down to vivacity:

full moon
above Jasper Gate

and

a fish in the canal
red fins

both, with minimal words, leave lasting images and the surprise of movement.

Xu Zhimo’s famous poem, a stanza of which has been memorialized on a monument in the back walk of King’s College, is translated by Clara Hsu in this issue. She takes minor liberties with it, titling the poem “Farewell River Cam” though the original bids farewell to “Cambridge.” But otherwise she adheres closely to the Chinese, quatrain by quatrain. Her major contributions to translations of this poem are tightened language and strong, active verbs. The broken reflection of the rainbow concludes with a wonderful susurrus: “immersed in illusory dreams.” And Hsu’s coinage, “Silence is the wind of parting,” remains faithful to the sense in Chinese while also refreshing our English idiom. All that lacks now for translations of this poem is preservation of rhyme—imperative, I’d argue, since Xu’s purpose was to import Romantic mannerisms to 20th-century Chinese poetry—but until then Hsu’s free-verse modernization suffices brilliantly.

* * *

Editorial Proclivities

It’s been a pleasure to read and review this issue of Cha, which has the virtue not only of being an accessible journal representing diverse talents but of being international and thus representing diverse geographical perspectives. If you followed the links to these poems, you’ll know that many are paired with commentary or reviews in the correlating blog, A Cup of Fine Tea, emphasizing the dialogue that small-press literary journals are intended to be.

The blog also regularly promotes the journal’s contributors, and on it you’ll find recent nominations for Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best of the Web prizes. While confessing that I only read the poems nominated from this issue, I’ll say that the editors do seem to favor poems that employ periphrastic repetition as a means to circle around answers. I won’t agree or disagree with their selections, but I do hold that the power of poetry to move derives from either its narrative force, or its accurate reproduction of the poet’s process toward vision and clarity.

I don’t know how many of us read hard copies of literary journals from start to finish. Online, it’s even easier to skip from page to page. Yet an editorial decision of organization must be made. In this issue of Cha, we begin in St. Petersburg, Russia, ellipticizing. We end in Cambridge, in translated Chinese, waving farewell. Have we been visitors to Europe and England all along? Outsiders to the English language? If so, where do we travel next?

Man Ray's "Larmes"

As we continue our exploration of ekphrastic poetry, poet Fiona Sze-Lorrain, whose first book (Water the Moon) we reviewed last month, graciously answers some questions that we’ve posed to her about the ekphrastic elements of her collection.

WATER THE MOON

LR: How do you envision your work with ekphrasis with respect to the larger arc or project of Water the Moon?

FSL: Ekphrasis is indeed one of the many channels I turn to for building the muscle of my imagination. The Greeks say, “In the beginning was the verb.” How about “In the beginning was the image”? I remember having read — a long time ago — an interview with the French theatre artist, Ariane Mnouchkine, who (probably influenced by the Japanese theatre philosopher and pioneer, Zeami) perceived emotion as coming from recognition, which is an useful perspective for actors. In a way or another, I too define my experience of ekphrasis as emotion coming from recognition… for instance, by recognizing something in paintings that can transform descriptive clues to deceptively personal/emotional landscapes or narrative possibilities. Part of the larger arc of Water the Moon is about dialogues with artistic voices or consciousness that follow me like shadows over time. Steichen, Van Gogh, Dora Maar, Man Ray… these happen to be just some of them whose iconic images play a role in molding my sensibilities since a child.

LR: In “Steichen’s Photographs,” you write “Photos have no verbs . . . / . . .Verbs are those trying not to pose” (58). Indeed, it seems that your ekphrastic engagement with photography in the collection is more immediate in nature than your engagement with other artistic media, like painting — for example, in “Van Gogh is Smiling,” you continually invite a reconstruction of his iconic images, “Let’s imagine fifteen sunflowers” or “Let’s retrace your starry blue night” (51), rather than delivering a direct experiential response to a particular work. In what ways does the camera’s eye provide a different type of visual or interpretive experience than other forms of visual art (e.g. painting, sculpture)?  How did these differences influence your decisions about craft and perspective?

FSL: Perhaps this is just a personal preference. I am married to a man who knows much about the world and craft of photography. By chance and good fortune, I have also crossed paths with the work of a few important photographers of our times. So I tend to feel more intimate with photographs, though paintings, to be honest, always offer me the contemplative space whenever I need it. Photographs — less so. They tend to be more visceral for me, and contain specific social realities that I can more easily identify with or pinpoint. As you can see, the cover image of my new book of poetry, Water the Moon (italics) is also a photograph. (It is entitled “Cortona,” taken by American photographer, Blake Dieter, in Italy). The clock in it is a metaphor of the Moon – in terms of time. I like films tremendously too and sometimes imagine photographs as immortalised snapshots from an unknown film. In general, it is harder for me to be oblique when writing about photographs than about paintings. You do not see something just because it is visible. There must be something else. What is it? I don’t know.

LR: Both “Steichen’s Photographs” and “Larmes” balance deftly on the seam between the perceived and the perceiver — in other words, we are made aware of the strange subjectivities at work when our gaze as readers is directed towards the speaker, whose observations become the subject of the poem as a piece of art, even while she herself is engaged in a process of fixing another artist’s subject in her own gaze. How can ekphrasis be of use to both the poet and the reader of poetry as an exercise in gaze, perspective, and subjectivity?

FSL: Ekphrasis (like any form of writing) is all about distance, because ultimately even if emotion must come from recognition, there comes a distilled point when the lie of the expression becomes evident: the artist, the painting, the poem, the writer, the reader, the reading … all these can never exist in one same space of subjectivity. “Let it not be the medium we question but the man — painter and photographer,” summed up Sadakichi Hartmann in “A Monologue” that was published in Camera Work in 1904, around the time of Steichen’s early photography. If anything, what ekphrasis offers is a bridge between various agendas, intentions and temporalities, based on an unchanging image. This bridge is dynamic — it constructs and deconstructs itself all the time. Besides, no one gaze is identical. I suppose it really is just simply the evocative power of an image that defines what we would call ekphrasis. At least this is what I feel – for now…

To read more about Fiona Sze-Lorrain, please visit her web site.   Water the Moon was released by Marick Press in February 2010 and is available for purchase on their site.

Melbourne-Based Retort Magazine

We were recently given a heads’ up about this fascinating interview in Retort Magazine that Singaporean poet Desmond Kon conducted with Fiona Sze-Lorrain (whose book, Water the Moon, we reviewed earlier this year).  [Thanks, D.K., for the link!]

Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Here’s an excerpt (Sze-Lorrain on place and geography in her work):

Places permeate my writing since you may say that I am someone of travels — in exile and displacement, so-called. I’ve traveled, yes, and at times, without a choice, but I am never a tourist. Pierre Nora sees places as sites of memories; I see places as moments and years. I thought that writing about places as memories risks falling into the trap of flat sentimentalism, or a re-invention of the past. Unlike most artists in exile who eschew geographical precision, I look towards the porosity of borders — both physical and temporal — for inspiration. Otherwise, places are no different from identities, and any kind of identity will never fail to imprison souls.

To read the rest of the interview, click here.   Also worth checking out is the latest issue of Cerise Press, a magazine that Sze-Lorrain creates and edits with Karen Rigby and Sally Molini. It’s an intriguing space that beautifully mixes translation, art, and lyric — and is well worth the read.

WATER THE MOON

Water the Moon by Fiona Sze-Lorrain | Marick Press (forthcoming 2010) | $14.95

From the opening poem of her debut collection, Fiona Sze-Lorrain explores both her ancestral and adopted homes from many lenses, including poems that capture the simple moments of a meal or walk down the street as well as poems that embed those moments in the grandeur of history and tradition.  This juxtaposition of the personal with the past serves as a poignant reminder of the ways in which history informs individual identity, yet in “A Talk with Mao Tse-tung” she writes, “Clearly history has no last word” and ends the poem with unanswered questions.  She reminds the reader that the personal also goes beyond the past and that each person has to find her own answers. In “The Sun Temple”, the speaker revisits the historic Sun Temple with her grandfather’s map, ultimately ending with the lines, “I tremble to realize that I can no longer / remember my grandfather – I am merely a tourist.”

Separation and distance resonate in the intimate moments she conveys. Her poems often begin with the specific and concrete, quietly expanding into a deeper reflections on what those moments represent. In “Breakfast, Rue Sainte-Anne”, she begins by describing congee (porridge) with, “Transfixed, I watch how the chef / shreds dried pork / into fine linear strips, drops / half-quarter slices of century egg / into a bowl of steamed rice.” The simple images soon turn into the speaker’s own relationship with the meal (“Today, I still have no idea / how to eat porridge with chopsticks”), and then into an imagined conversation with her father, in which he complains that both the taste and price of the food are nothing compared to “the rickshaw streets of his old Shanghai.” In this way, she goes beyond the initial preparation of congee to access memories and evoke longing.

Sze-Lorrain’s speaker is not afraid to share her vulnerability, expressing her fears and uncertainties with dark images and sharp, precise language. The poem “Moon” opens with “symbolizes fear in my culture, / a dark force that hunts / until you cower.” These lines launch directly off the title of the poem, immediately plunging the reader into the piece. The poem “Invisible Eye” opens with “Fog / chalks the skeletons / of houses. I pry / open / doors of dusk.” The short lines propel the reader forward, paralleling the speaker’s hurried walk home while being followed.

In the last section of Water the Moon, Sze-Lorrain responds to other artwork and artists. In “Larmes”, she meditates on the tears of a photographed woman, and in “Steichen’s Photographs” she opens with, “Souls inside them are probably speaking. / Are they listening? Are they waiting?” This curiosity about the power of art is also reflected in her pieces for or about famous artists.  In “Apologies to Dora”, she writes to Dora Maar, a painter and writer who is usually remembered as a lover and muse of Picasso rather than as an artist in her own right. She writes pieces to Van Gogh, Celan, Beckett, and more. These epistolary poems meditate on the roles of art and fame, with the speaker simultaneously appreciating and marveling at the roles these figures played. Along with Chinese and French histories, these poems serve as an exploration of artistic ancestors and the speaker’s continued desire to reconcile the personal with the past.

Sze-Lorrain intertwines French and Chinese cultural references with ease. In “China”, the speaker visits a Parisian restaurant called Moon Palace, and includes distinct and unusual descriptions such as “Satre and mandarin ducks are the mural decor” and “Someone imitates Li Po, insisting vodka on a table.” The depth and wealth of her experiences lead to great versatility and range in her work.  But Sze-Lorrain’s greatest prowess lies in her ability to transform these daily experiences into grand conclusions. In “Rendez-vous at Pont des Arts”, the poem begins with a specific encounter but ends in the unknown future: “Days connect years, years become places — / you travel over dreams or on bicycle. / Will I find you at Pont des Arts? / Moon crossing bridge in vanishing stars.” Here, as in the rest of her collection, Sze-Lorrain displays the strength of her ability to transcend/transgress geographical borders: though her speaker’s experiences may often seem far removed to the American reader, Sze-Lorrain always returns us to a place that feels universally resonant.

Find out more about Fiona Sze-Lorrain at her web site: www.fionasze.com.