Grace Lau’s poetry will saunter into a room inside of your heart, take a seat in the front row, and stay there for weeks. These poems bravely make their way into the lonely corners and abandoned underbellies of some very painful places: a childhood closet, a complicated inheritance, forsaken faith, queer love, and family, to name just a few, and somehow render these memories into heirlooms. I read these poems once to discover what this poet has given us, and will now read them again and again, in order to truly unwrap and cherish her gifts.

Grace Lau’s debut poetry collection is blessed by fine details—fine details that hold immense meaning. Multi-generational histories steep in Grandma’s cup of cha. A lifetime of queer desire knits along with the poet’s own skinned knees. Lau’s refined poetic lines and crisp stanzas ask us to slow down the pace of our reading, so we too can discover the deep substance of each image and word.

Ripe with intention and embroidered with the tiny pinpricks of pain, her language, the one she discovers alone in the dark, where we have all been left for so long, is naked, free of ballast as a sinking ship that does not sink but sails into the next sunrise, truth.

The poems in Grace Lau’s debut collection, The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak embody wryness, curiosity, and care.

Lau’s work lurches off the page and seizes your hand like an old friend that cannot wait to catch up with you; you learn of the speaker’s romantic escapades, their family, their hurts old and new. Reading this collection makes you feel reached out to, and that is no small feat in a time everything and everyone can seem very, very far away.

Lau plays expertly in the messy gray between forms and realities, between languages and cultures. Through these juxtapositions we see what it’s like to live intersectionality: the beauty and the struggles. It is in this space between the black and white that the collection makes its home.