Fred Wah

In a series of short sketches, Wah writes of his father's restaurant in Nelson, B.C. in a book that is neither fiction nor non-fiction. Poet Wah loves wordplay and puns, making his book a delight to read. Since it is also about Wah trying to understand his own mixed ancestry and trying to come to terms with the shameful treatment of Chinese in early Canadian history, it also contains evident anger. But it is love that ultimately shines through.

"Including poetry projects, a chapbook and incidental poems previously published in magazines and by small presses, is a door makes use of the poem's ability for "suddenness" to subvert closure: the sudden question, the sudden turn, the sudden opening - writing that is generated from linguistic mindfulness, improvisation, compositional problem-solving, collaborative events, travel, investigation and documentary - in short, poetry as practice." "Part one, "Isadora Blue," is grounded in the author's encounter with the smashed and broken doors along the hurricane-devastated waterfront of Telchac Puerto, a small village on the north coast of the Yucatan Peninsula. It resonates throughout the other three sections of the book, with its attention to hybridity and "betweenness"--A poetic investigation of racialized otherness - and the composition of "citizen" and "foreigner" through history and language." "Part two of this series of poems, "Ethnogy Journal," written during a trip to Thailand and Laos in 1999, hinges around aspects of "tourist" and "native." Here the poems play in the interstices of spectacle, food and social sightseeing." "Much of this poetry is framed by Wah's acute sense of the marginalized non-urban local "place" and coloured by his attempt to articulate senses of otherness and resistance, or writing the "public self," particularly in the book's third section, "Discount Me In" - a series of sixteen poems from his discursive poetic essay "Count Me In."" "The fourth section, "Hinges," is tinted with portraits of the social subject mired in a diasporic mix, a metanarrative trope in Fred Wah's work that began with Breathin' My Name With a Sigh." "Characteristically playful and compositionally musical, this is poetry that watches both sides of the doorway: unsettled, unpredictable, closed and open. Sometimes the door swings and can be kicked. Sometimes it's simply missing. Sometimes it's a sliding door."--Jacket.

"Toward. Some. Air. is an unprecedented collection of contemporary poetics from Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Here, poet and scholar Amy De'Ath and former Parliamentary Poet Laureate Fred Wah collect a wide range of conversations, statements, essays, profiles, and poems and place these often radical and interdisciplinary approaches in proximal relation to each other. The result is an open invitation to consider the contours and meanings of Anglophone poetic practice as a mode of interpreting the world, its potential for transforming subjectivity, or something else entirely. With over forty renowned contributors it is an invaluable resource for students, teachers, and writers."--

Medallions of Belief is a chapbook configured on the occasion of a workshop and reading for Toronto New School of Writing titled "How to Write a Poem for the Queen." The workshop was held on Saturday, March 10, 2012. The poems are selected from past publications as well as unpublished and newer poems, and they celebrate thinking around the notion of an "occasional" poem. The poem "The Snowflake Age" was written at the request of the Speakers of the House of Commons and the Senate for Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee.

"A series of unique collaborative image-text projects, Sentenced to Light privileges its poetic and formal textual space outside most of the images that are its original twins and offers the reader a glimpse of the dialectic of larger conversations, the unpredictable, improvisatory bavardage that whispers between words and pictures in an intrinsically poetic space."--Jacket.