Enter the Chrysanthemum

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Enter the Chrysanthemum

Enter the Chrysanthemum is a luminous collection of poems about family, love and loss. Employing precise imagery and concise language, Lam plumbs and mines ordinary events and experiences to find a central core of poetic insight and sometimes harrowing truth. Whether written from the vantage point of a young child observing her parents, a single parent struggling to raise a child, or a daughter watching a parent’s decline and death, these poems reconnect us to what it means to be human. Enter the Chrysanthemum is Lam’s second book of poetry.

AUTHOR

Fiona Tinwei Lam

Fiona Tinwei Lam has authored two poetry books, Intimate Distances (finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award) and Enter the Chrysanthemum and a children’s book, The Rainbow Rocket. She co-edited Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood (McGill-Queen’s University Press), and edited The Bright Well: Contemporary Canadian Poems about Facing Cancer. Her poetry and prose appear in over 30 anthologies. Her poems have appeared twice on BC buses through the Poetry in Transit program, and her video poems have been screened locally and internationally. She has an MFA in creative writing from UBC, as well as a BA (UBC) and LLB (Queen’s) and LLM (University of Toronto). She is currently is a teacher/mentor at SFU Continuing Studies. fionalam.net

Jane Silcott’s first collection of essays, Everything Rustles, was published in 2013 with Anvil Press and shortlisted for the 2014 Hubert Evans Nonfiction award in the BC Book Prizes. Her writing has appeared in several Canadian literary magazines and anthologies and been recognized by the CBC Literary Awards (in 2005 she won second place for an essay about motherhood and writing); the National and Western Magazine Awards, Room Magazine, and the Creative Nonfiction Collective of Canada. Jane is a mentor in the MFA Program in Creative Nonfiction at the University of King’s College in Halifax and Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and a BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Victoria. janesilcott.ca

Reviews

Fiona Tinwei Lam’s third collection of poetry is Odes & Laments. She has authored two previous poetry books, a children’s book, edited The Bright Well: Contemporary Canadian Poems on Facing Cancer, and co-edited Love Me True: Writers Reflect on the Ins, Outs, Ups & Downs of Marriage with Jane Silcott. Lam won The New Quarterly’s Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Prize and was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award. Her work appears in more than thirty anthologies, including The Best of the Best Canadian Poetry in English: The Tenth Anniversary Edition and Forcefield: 77 Women Poets of BC. Her poetry videos have screened at festivals locally and internationally. She teaches at Simon Fraser University’s Continuing Studies.

“Lam’s poems resist too much gravity. She deals with the arc of three generations as they experience, variously, birth, childhood, divorce, disintegration and death. Grave enough, in every sense—and Lam leaves us in no doubt that our end and hers is to be “mere husks/sourly persisting, as humans do.” Nevertheless, one closes this book, after all its anatomization of life’s overwhelming disappointments, losses and despair, with a strangely uplifting sense of optimism.

This is partly because of the hope and consolation—and the new beginning—that her son provides against the crumbling of everything else: she redefines her identity and helps her son to build his. Lam says, in “Kindergarten at the Transylvania Flower Restaurant” that they are gathering it “crumb by crumb.”

It’s also because she brings the reader into the intensity of the moment, while keeping herself a little removed by wry humour and wise understanding. There can be good writing that abandons itself entirely to passion, but this is rare and depends on rare genius: those who attempt it are more often in the realm of therapy than art. Lam’s is a necessary distance of perspective and craft—she needs, paradoxically, to put herself calmly outside the experience in order to bring the reader into its intensity.”

—Cha: An Asian Literary Journal