“Quiet Night Think is a stunning work.” — Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“One function of the poet at any time is to discover by his own thought and feeling what seems to him to be poetry at that time,” writes Wallace Stevens. In Quiet Night Think, award-winning poet Gillian Sze expresses her own definition.

During the remarkable period of early parenthood, Sze’s new maternal role urges her to contemplate her own origins, both familial and artistic. Comprised of six personal essays, poems, and a concluding long poem, Quiet Night Think takes its title from a direct translation of an eighth-century Chinese poem by Li Bai, the subject of the opening essay. Sze’s memory of reading Li Bai’s poem as a child marks the beginning of an unshakable encounter with poetry. What follows is an intimate anatomization of her particular entanglement with languages and cultures.

In her most generically diverse book yet, Sze moves between poetry and prose, mother and writer, the lyrical and the autobiographical, all the while inviting readers to meditate with her on questions of emergence and transformation: What are you trying to be? Where does a word break off? What calls to us throughout the night?

Sales and Market Bullets

• Sze’s poetry has been nominated for the Leon E. & Ann M. Pavlick Poetry Prize, the QWF A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, the ReLit Award, and the McAuslan First Book Prize, and received an honourable mention in the Quebec Writing Competition.
• Recipient of the 3Macs carte blanche Prize (Quebec Writers’ Federation), the Winnipeg Writer’s Collective Short Fiction Contest, and the University of Winnipeg Writers’ Circle Prize
• “Succulent in its excellence, Sze’s poetry insists that cultural ‘difference’ is what can make a beautiful difference in our apprehension of the ‘beautiful.’” — George Elliott Clarke on Peeling Rambutan
• Quiet Night Think reflects on the author’s own identity as a first-generation Chinese-Canadian while ruminating on both the constraints and liberatory potential of tradition, especially where motherhood is concerned.

Audience

• Canadian poetry fans
• CanLit enthusiasts
• Fans of Sze’s work (this is her 6th collection, she has also written 4 chapbooks)