Synopses & Reviews
Including poetry projects, a chapbook and incidental poems previously published in magazines and by small presses,
is a door makes use of the poems ability for suddenness” to subvert closure: the sudden question, the sudden turn, the sudden openingwriting that is generated from linguistic mindfulness, improvisation, compositional problem-solving, collaborative events, travel, investigation and documentaryin short, poetry as practice.
Part one, Isadora Blue,” is grounded in the authors 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 othernessand 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 Wahs 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 books 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 Wahs 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 its simply missing. Sometimes its a sliding door.
Review
Wahs poems continually return us to
the realization of our shared, not individual, life.”
Montreal Gazette
These four sequences are what we once called trips, not so much to Mexico and Thailand and the Koots, as out of syntax toward a world in which words are things indeed, or at least are treated as such. You may feel as if youve had a stroke and are trying mightily to read right. Predicates can appear as if out of the dark. This is where Wah has been leading us, conscious as all get out, innocent as a lynx. This is what happens to a language when someone finally gets it away from the people it was named after.”
George Bowering
Without a doubt, is a door is a dazzler, a thoughtful, playful and stunningly skillful four-part foray into the nature of suddenness and its inherent ability to subvert closure on the brink of unexpected entrances and exits.”
Globe and Mail
Synopsis
is a door includes poems generated from linguistic mindfulness, improvisation, compositional problem-solving, collaborative events, travel, investigation documentary.
About the Author
Fred Wah Fred Wah was one of the founding editors of the poetry newsletter TISH. Of his seventeen books of poetry, is a door received the BC Book Prize, Waiting For Saskatchewan received the Governor-Generals Award and So Far was awarded the Stephanson Award for Poetry. Diamond Grill, a biofiction about hybridity and growing up in a small-town Chinese-Canadian café won the Howard OHagan Award for Short Fiction, and his collection of critical writing, Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity, received the Gabrielle Roy Prize.