If you like blues, weather as metaphor, and "weird, cotton numbness"
A Grain of Rice by Evelyn Lau
VIOLETS’ PICKS 012
Where I found it
Once upon a time, my life was full of strange dichotomies: Watching Pokemon after school while reading a true tale about drug addiction and prostitution. When I was an early teen, I read a book about a girl just a little bit older than me, living in the same city as me, who went to the same high school that I would be heading to. At 14, feeling stifled by the pressures of immigrant parents, she ran away from home and started living on the streets just blocks away from where I grew up. Today Evelyn Lau is in her 50s and has become a successful writer with numerous books under her belt including several volumes of poetry, and even held the title of Vancouver’s Poet Laureate from 2011—2014. Two decades after reading Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid and being scared to shit, I came across her work again.
First impressions
A still life painting. A still life moment. I wouldn’t have known this woman was the same girl whose voice and story engrossed me, whose life seemed as parallel to mine as it could possibly get other than the part where she had run away and our paths diverged. I hadn’t read anything of her’s since. But seeing her name and confirming that it was in fact the Evelyn Lau, I felt a certain sense of relief knowing that she had achieved exactly what she wanted, like reading a young girl’s diary and learning that she made her dreams come true. I wonder what she’s writing about today. Am I being led into a faux sense of calmness or will this be the contemplative, quiet kind of poetry you’d want to read alone on a rainy day?
They said it
Many of the poems in A Grain of Rice, her sixth book of poetry, are haunted by the deaths of friends and family. They explore cultural history, stories in the news, travel and place, especially the relationship between home and our nomadic inclinations. In many respects the book is a meditation on loss. Grief and aging, family history, an attention to place. poems on local urban social issues; poems that seek and find their inspiration in Asian culture and literature all form a tapestry of faces that simultaneously defy and embrace the inevitable and celebrate the transformational.
—From the publisher
A line to remember
The nudge of nausea in the throat. Weariness spreading like the ice burn of opiates. Your heart exploding like a shot apple. —From “Memorial”
Strange things happen in the ear, that musky unplumbed space— silence, then a marine roar, clicks and clatters, a weird cotton numbness —From “Vertigo”
You are even losing your taste for the forbidden— glistening strips of salty bacon, slabs of liver soaked in sauce, pocketfuls of tooth-pulling toffee. My friend, what then could make you stay? —From “To a Friend Near the End”
I would reel down the too-bright street in a daze, gaze at anyone with food in their hands— molecules of salt and grease and sugar exploding like dandelions in the breeze —From “A Grain of Rice”
You might like this if…
You love or you hate Vancouver, or you don’t know anything about Vancouver but love getting to know new cities. If you’re from Vancouver, reading a poetry book that takes cues from the city’s landmarks and landscapes is like watching a movie filmed in your city—kind of cool. You’ve been dealing with the loss of someone and there are no words, but if there were, you just might find them here. You crave texture and sound and language that slides down smooth except when it doesn’t, when it electrifies for a moment instead. You can find the pulse of life in the mundane, or you desperately want to.
This was the colour of…
Blue. An overwhelming washed out, enveloping kind of blue. Blue for the sky, blue for the sea, blue for everything in between. Blue steel and ice shards. Blue like looking through a glass lens into the past. A touch of “evening skies painted with pomegranate”, and dandelions exploding in the breeze.
Details
Year: 2012
Author: Evelyn Lau, whose aforementioned diary-turned-memoir was turned into a 1994 movie starring Sandra Oh
Location: Vancouver
Publisher: Oolichan Books
Shop: Amazon
You’re reading Violets’ Picks, where every Sunday I take you through an adventure brought to you by a poetry collection. Here’s some other Violets’ Picks this month you may have missed:
