Odes & Laments
Through poems that celebrate the overlooked beauty in the everyday or that mourn human incursions upon the natural world, Fiona Tinwei Lam weaves polythematic threads into a shimmering tapestry that reveals the complexities of being human in an environment under threat. Inspired by Pablo Neruda's Elemental Odes, this wide-ranging and diverse collection plays with the yin and yang of everyday existence, employing lyricism, narrative, humour and an occasional dash of irreverence and fun through visual play with text and typography.
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Fiona Tinwei Lam has authored two poetry books, Intimate Distances (finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award) and Enter the Chrysanthemum and a children's book, The Rainbow Rocket. She co-edited Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood (McGill-Queen's University Press), and edited The Bright Well: Contemporary Canadian Poems About Facing Cancer. Her poetry and prose appear in over 30 anthologies. Her poems have appeared twice on BC buses through the Poetry in Transit program, and her video poems have been screened locally and internationally. She has an MFA in creative writing from UBC, as well as a BA (UBC) and LLB (Queen's) and LLM (University of Toronto). She is currently is a teacher/mentor at SFU Continuing Studies.
"The poems in Fiona Tinwei Lam's latest collection, Odes & Laments, are both sharp and rich, brimming with insight and optimism. While the collection spans the spectrum from the lyric to the concrete, these poems always seem to cohere, always find a place, always intertwine and interconnect. Odes & Laments is an excellent book! And one that I am excited to return to again and again." -- Jordan Abel
