Books by Fiona Tinwei Lam

A new collection by award-winning poet Fiona Tinwei Lam that explores what it means to live in an environment constantly under threat and that challenges our perceptions of the everyday, transforming the mundane into the sublime.

"What keeps us together? What breaks us apart? In Love Me True, 27 creative nonfiction writers and 15 poets explore the enormity of marriage and committed relationships and how they have challenged, shaped, supported and changed them. The stories and poems in this collection delve deep into the mysteries of long-term bonds. The authors cover a gamut of issues and ideas-everything from everyday conflicts to deep philosophical divides, as well as jealousy, adultery, physical or mental illness, and loss. There's happiness here too, along with love and companionship, whether the long-term partnering is monogamous, polyamorous, same-sex or otherwise. From surprise proposals, stolen quickies, and snoring to arranged marriage, affairs, suicide, and much more, the wide-ranging personal stories and poems in Love Me True are sometimes funny, sometimes harrowing, and always engaging as they offer their intimate and varied insights into the complex state that is marriage."--

This is a luminous collection that takes us on a keen-eyed journey from childhood to parenthood: from a child''s perspective of her parents, through to the transition to adulthood as a single parent, then finally to the witnessing of a parent''s decline and death. Lam details the slow and sometimes painful transformation into motherhood, the transition of generations, the inherent politics behind relationships, and the essential solitude and struggle of being outside the traditionally defined family. In her title poem "Chrysanthemum", Lam remembers her mother''s gentle hand with the watercolour brush: "Then, from the finest brush, the outline/ of each petal. Flesh flowed from the fuller one,/ tipped with yellow or lavender,/ until every crown had bloomed/ amid the throng of leaves./ How her hand knew paper through brush/ If only I had been paper,/ that upturned and delicate face,/ stroked and stroked again with such/ precise tenderness, such a patient hand". Lam''s new collection is fundamentally as much an exploration of profound loss as it is of love and an individual''s reconnection to humanity. This is her second book of poetry.