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 Yucatán Peninsula. It resonates throughout the other three sections of the book, with its attention to hybridity and between-ness”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.

is a door

Literature & Fiction

Wah, Fred

Poetry

Talonbooks

Music at the Heart of Thinking

Red Deer Press

Extreme Poets

Rowley, Mari-Louise

Lynes, Jeanette

Broken Jaw Pr

Comprised of two lines of poetic text flowing along a 114-foot-long map of the Columbia River, this powerful image-poem by acclaimed poets Fred Wah and Rita Wong presents language yearning to understand the consequences of our hydroelectric manipulation of one of North America’s largest river systems. beholden: a poem as long as the river stems from the interdisciplinary artistic research project “River Relations: A Beholder’s Share of the Columbia River,” undertaken as a response to the damming and development of the Columbia River in British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon, as well as to the upcoming renegotiation of the Columbia River Treaty. Authors Fred Wah and Rita Wong spent time exploring various stretches of the river, all the way to its mouth near Astoria, Oregon. They then spent several months creating long poems along the Columbia, each searching for a language that evoked the complexities of our colonial appropriation of it. beholden was then assembled as a page-turning book that reproduces the two long poems as they respond to the meanderings of the river flowing two thousand kilometres through Canada, the United States, and the territories and reserves of Indigenous Peoples. Visual artist Nick Conbere then transferred this winding footprint into a monumental, 114-foot horizontal banner. beholden: a poem as long as the river “reads” the geographic, historical, political, and social dimensions of the Columbia River, literally and figuratively, proposing two contrasting kinds of attention. As both a stand-alone poem and an accompanying piece to the visual installation exhibited at various galleries, beholden represents a vital contribution to a larger dialogue around the river through visual art, writing, and public engagement.

beholden: a poem as long as the river

Wong, Rita

The music of thinking. The thinking of music. Music at the Heart of Thinking is a poetry that works through language as the true practice of thought and improvisation as the tool that listens to and notates thinking. From jazz, the unpredictable ad lib driving itself from itself. From a drunken Shaolin monk, the poem as imbalanced tai chi. From Keats's negative capability, the half-closed eye, the estrangement of language. All intended to bump beyond the end of the word into focus. As a response to readings in contemporary texts, art, and ideas. Music at the Heart of Thinking relocates critical language and thinking to the poetic bavardage at the heart of such endeavours. The poetics that generates these texts arises out of a lifelong poem project that has its roots in the long poem genre of the '80s and its interest in the resistance to closure and the containment of meaning characteristic of the lyric. This book continues the work of two previous out-of-print publications, Music at the Heart of Thinking (1987) and Alley, Alley Home Free (1990). The poems are generated as textual responses in the reading, looking, and listening of the poet's attention to his cultural milieu. Thus the writing addresses contemporary texts and art over the past forty years. Within this poetry of estrangement lie possible coherences for some sense of writing as a notation for thinking as feeling. The difficulty of this writing is literal and intentional, wary of any attempt to make thinking simple, easy, or predictable.

Music at the Heart of Thinking: Improvisations 1–170

A critical scrapbook collected from fifteen years of writing. Contains essays, reviews, interviews, journals, notes, and poetic improvisations on contemporary poetry and identity.

Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity: Critical Writing 1984-1999 (Writer as Critic)

History & Criticism

NeWest Press

Diamond Grill is a rich banquet where Salisbury Steak shares a menu with chicken fried rice, bird's nest soup sets the stage for Christmas pudding; where racism from whites for being Chinese and from Chinese for being white simmers behind the shiny clean surface of the action in the cafe. This story of family and identity, migration and integration, culture and self-discovery is told through family history, memory, glimpses of life, and the occasional recipe.

Diamond Grill

United States

Newest Pr

This story of family and identity, migration and integration, culture and self-discovery is told through family history, memory, and the occasional recipe. Diamond Grill is a rich banquet where Salisbury Steak shares a menu with chicken fried rice, birds nest soup sets the stage for Christmas plum pudding; where racism simmers behind the shiny clean surface of the action in the cafe. An exciting new edition of Fred Wahs best-selling bio-fiction, on the 10th anniversary of its original publication, with added text and an all new afterword by the author.

Diamond Grill (Landmark Edition)

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Books by Wah, Fred