Asian Literature

Asian Literature

• Heart’s Hydrography
  • Awards and Honours:
    • Winner: Word Awards, Specialty Book
    • Winner: Word Awards, Writer of Colour

  Everyday perceptions made radiant.

  • Praise:

    Winter landscapes, water landscapes, the landscapes of family love and frustration, and of the soul’s seasons - all these are mapped by Sally Ito with deep compassion and richly tactile images. Everyday perceptions made radiant.

    —Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury

• seas move away
  • Awards and Honours:
    • Shortlisted: Saskatchewan Book Awards, Best First Book Award

  [Leow's] work pounds away at the façade of Canadian tolerance and diversity. It’s funky with the fermentation of colonial rule, and bitter as

  ...
  • Praise:

    In Seas Move Away, Joanne Leow guides us through the tumultuous present of migrant life, readying us with the necessary allegories to weather the coming storms. Leow gifts us with new maritime languages for diaspora, a counterpoetics for geopolitical and imperial violence, a sedimentary song for life anew.

    —Adrian De Leon, barangay: an offshore poem

    Collisions, erosions and fractures occur in both external and internal landscapes in Joanne Leow’s Seas Move Away. Lyrical and intimate when addressing lovers and family, Leow’s voice shifts into an incisive investigation of colonial legacies, interrogating and unsettling what is assumed as necessary or wise. Travelling between tropical tidal longings, and the stultifying cold of Saskatchewan winters, the poems in Seas Move Away embody a palette of rich hues and nuanced textures.

    —Lydia Kwa, Oracle Bone

    This is an oceanic collection. Leow’s lyrics, like sea currents, carve out deep recesses into the mind. Her courageous interrogations of power are scalpel-like, delicately exposing the “what histories are interred” in island, cities, and prairie. Her work pounds away at the façade of Canadian tolerance and diversity. It’s funky with the fermentation of colonial rule, and bitter as a medicinal tonic. Don’t just stand at the edge of this multiplicity—swim in with your strongest strokes.

    —Phoebe Wang, Walking Occupations