Achieving An Equilibrium: An Interview with Cicely Belle Blain

The following interview is part four of an eight-part series of conversations with BC poets which I released in April 2021. All eight interviews were originally posted at ReadLocalBC.ca. This was the third year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read the 2019 interviews here, and the 2020 interviews here).

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Manitoba - Cicely Belle Blain

I found Black people between groves of wheat
drove hours along open road back to Winnipeg
heard whispers in the topography
Ta-Nehisi said I could go anywhere
he told me in two hundred pages that Black folks could travel
said seeing the world is not a luxury
reserved for white men

we do travel though

some of us are still
on ships

Reprinted with permission
from Burning Sugar 
(Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020).

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Rob Taylor: You grew up in London (the big one that people outside of Canada know about) and moved to Vancouver for university. It’s been a relatively short amount of time, then, in which you’ve established yourself in the political (Black Lives Matter Vancouver, Bakau Consulting) and literary (Burning Sugar) life of the city. Could you talk about coming to Vancouver and learning to navigate those particular worlds? What do you think made it possible for you to establish yourself so quickly? 

Cicely Belle Blain: I came to Vancouver to attend UBC. I had never been to Vancouver or even Canada before so it was a pretty nerve wracking experience. Aside from the mountains and beaches, the main selling point was the Karen McKellin International Leader of Tomorrow Award that UBC offered me: a scholarship that makes it possible for international students who cannot afford the high tuition prices to attend. 

I have always been someone who gets involved in a lot of things. As someone with ADHD, the academic side of things is really challenging, so from a young age I’ve thrown myself into extra-curricular activities, especially if they were centered around politics and social justice. In addition, coming from a family of activists and change makers, helped me feel really primed and equipped to jump into activism, no matter the city. 

I think my ability to grow my business, literary career and activism work is a combination of some of the privileges I hold as a light skinned, educated, British person and also the fearlessness I was taught by my grandmother and mum. I have always been instilled with the tools and confidence to stand up for myself and go for every opportunity.

RT: What major roadblocks stood in your way?

CBB: A lot of the road blocks I have experienced are tied to my race, gender and age. Especially in starting my business, I felt so many doors were closed to me because I did not have the intergenerational wealth and business acumen to understand all the complexities of running a business. Especially in the beginning, I felt clients looked down on me and undervalued my intelligence and knowledge. 

RT: In “Hollywood, Florida” you write of “cross-Atlantic love” and it feels possible that you are speaking both of your own cross-Atlantic life and the Atlantic-spanning triangular slave trade. Indeed, in the first section of the book, “Place,” you travel in and around Europe, West Africa, and North America—all homes to either yourself or members of your extended family. 

I’m obviously not equating the two “triangles”, but are there ways in which your travels caused you to think about the slave trade, and its ongoing legacy, in different ways than you would have if you’d stayed put in London?

CBB: Yes, definitely. Moving to North America and the opportunities I have had to travel have really exposed to me the unending and global nature of anti-Blackness. It has allowed me to connect the dots between my experiences growing up in London, the histories of colonialism and slavery, (which didn’t necessarily happen on British soil but were driven and enacted by Britain for centuries), and how my experience as a Black British person is a result of both the wealth generated by the Empire and the creation of anti-Blackness.

RT: Assuming the poems with place names as titles (like “Manitoba”) were written in those places, you traveled over half the planet in writing this book! At one point you mention that your browser has “thirty flight search tabs” and that you own “more bathing suits than underwear,” so I suspect travel has been central to your life and identity (you note at one point that travel “becomes my greatest escape”). 

CBB: The ability to travel freely to so many places is definitely a huge privilege and something I understood to be a privilege from a very young age. My family made a concerted effort to provide us with the opportunity to travel, even at the sacrifice of other luxuries. I remember in ninth grade my teacher asked me why I didn’t choose geography as a subject to pursue and I replied that I felt like I already had front row seats to the best geographical education. I have always valued and appreciated my parents’ willingness to take risks—they’ve moved from the Netherlands to Italy to Kenya in the time I’ve lived in Canada.

RT: We’ve all had to live life differently since the onset of the pandemic, but I wonder if that isn’t particularly true for you, having lost your ability to travel. How has your time been during the pandemic? Has the requirement to stay in one place caused you to look at the world, or yourself, any differently?

CBB: Over the past year the value that travel holds has changed. It is no longer about exploration and fun and leisure, but about connecting or reconnecting with people, ancestors or culture. This has allowed me to view travel less from a Western perspective of ticking things off a bucket list and more as a sacred opportunity to find parts of me that are missing. I hope when the pandemic is over, I can dedicate my future travels to places like Gambia, Jamaica and other lands where my ancestry lies.

RT: In addition to your physical travels around the world, the poems in Burning Sugar also travel the internet in their explorations of racial injustice. “How many white people can say their death will end up on YouTube? Nestled between Ariana Grande and reruns of Ellen?” you write so powerfully in “Dear Philando Castille.” As an activist and organizer, what do you think the internet has enabled you to do that was unavailable to previous generations? 

CBB: I think the unique experience of millennials is that we were the first to grow up almost entirely online. For older generations, it’s something that came along later, while Gen Z are getting to learn from our mistakes and successes. From as young as 6 or 7, I have pretty formative memories that revolve around the internet; by 10 I was using MSN to talk to friends (and strangers) online and so much of my self-exploration around my queerness, race and gender identity is thanks to the internet. While it’s not always safe, I think it is truly influential and I am so grateful to have grown up in this age (I often try to imagine what people did in the Spanish flu pandemic with no technology…). 

RT: You mention that it’s “not always safe” on the internet (to say the least!). In what ways do you think he internet has made activism and organizing more difficult?

CBB: The main issue with the internet in my experience as an activist is the exposure to harm and violence from strangers. Many of the poems in Burning Sugar I wrote in 2017 after I left Vancouver for 6 months because of the hate and death threats I was receiving as a result of speaking up against police involvement in Pride.

RT: I’m so sorry that happened to you. You write about your experience at the Pride parade in the long poem “Toronto” (“We asked for recognition, safety, compassion, empathy and freedom. What we got was dismissal, hypervisibility, vilification and violence”). “Toronto” sits at the centre of your book and is, essentially, a short essay. This kind of genre-mixing is happening more frequently in Canadian poetry, perhaps most notably in your editor Vivek Shraya’s collection, even this page is white, which places a series of interviews at its centre. 

Could you talk about the choice to put the essay (essay-poem?) at the middle of the book? More broadly, can you talk about what ways Shraya helped shape Burning Sugar (which she says “had all of the elements there by the time it reached me”)?

CBB: Working with Vivek was magical. As a young queer person of colour I was completely clueless on how to publish my work, and the opportunities and wisdom she provided were invaluable.

I knew that I wanted to explore different styles and genre. I really love all kinds of writing, and always have, and didn’t want to limit myself to just poems. I had intended to include more essays but they were the most time consuming, to play with the delicate balance of being beautiful and educational.

RT: “Toronto” explores the simultaneous desire to be at once visible and invisible—the desire to stand out (as queer, as black) and to blend into the crowd. Your jobs as a diversity consultant and a writer are very “public facing,” to say the least! How are you feeling now about that balance in your life? Has the nature of the balance you desire shifted at all since the time described in “Toronto”? Do you feel like you’re better able to achieve it?

CBB: I am currently feeling good about this balance. I think that has come from a boost in confidence over the past year; with the release and success of Burning Sugar, I can really feel the validation and affirmation that my work is important and people actually want to read it or hear me speak. 

I have always struggled with impostor syndrome, especially after spending four years in a predominantly white academic institution. To achieve success in my writing and in my business feels like I am finally doing what I am good at, and it is appreciated and admired by others. This allows me to feel like less of a fraud when I post online or appear in media interviews. People are genuinely looking to me for my knowledge and expertise and that allows me to feel less anxious and awkward about it all. Although I am still a very awkward person—but most people who know me say I pull it off well.

RT: Ha! Well, you don’t show it in interviews, at least.

The second section of Burning Sugar, entitled “Art”, explores art exhibits by Black artists, and features letters (“epistolary poems,” if we’re being fancy) to the artists themselves. Your mother was a visual artist, and you note that you spent “many a weekend trawling the galleries of Europe”. How do you think visual and performance art has informed your writing? Your activism?

CBB: Art was definitely my first introduction to politics and activism. My mum, who is an artist and art teacher (she was even my art teacher in school), has always taught me that art has meaning and the power to make change. Almost all of the exhibitions mentioned in the book, I went with my mum and she has always provided spaces for critical thinking and exploration of creativity.

RT: Your speaking to/with visual art by Black artists reminded me of Chantal Gibson’s wonderful collection, How She Read (you can read my interview with Gibson, from a previous iteration of this interview series, here). In addition to exploring the art, you both also focus on the overwhelmingly white spaces (the walls and the people) in which visual art is usually displayed. In your letter-poem “Dear Selina”, about UK performance artist Selina Thompson, you write:

Under the dim lights, I felt the vibrations of white people. Consumed by an intergenerational fascination with you/me/us. Enraged at their ancestors and counterparts—but never at themselves. Oblivious, mostly, to their complicity in the story you tell.

I also felt the Black bodies—some were my friends; others were people I wished I knew. Most were tense, leaning forward, metaphorical arms outstretched to hold you or be you or something else.

You obviously think a lot about space and audience: how they influence the art; how the various parts of an audience receive a work differently. A poetry book, like a gallery, has a lot of white space and is predominately consumed by white/straight “viewers,” though the reading of a poetry book is usually a private act, invisible to the poet. What were your thoughts about audience as you prepared Burning Sugar for publication? How do you think the unavoidable whiteness of a large portion of your audience shaped, and shapes, the book? Who do you imagine are the various members of your invisible “room” full of readers, and what do you hope they’re taking away from it?

CBB: I definitely had the potential whiteness of the audience in mind when writing, which is one thing I regret about the book. It is only very recently as people start to question and critique diversity and inclusion consulting or anti-racism training, that I realised a lot of anti-racism education is directed towards white people. We simplify big concepts, or sometimes even exploit our own trauma, to educate white people (I write about this here). 

When I was writing Burning Sugar, I was doing this—writing for white people to understand me better, when really I wanted to be writing for myself and other Black queer people. I think I did achieve an equilibrium but I’m not sure.

RT: The last section of Burning Water, “Child”, is about – surprise! – your childhood. The default assumption would be that one would put their poems about childhood at the beginning of their first book, not the end. Could you talk about that choice to close the book with it? Is it connected in any way to that equilibrium you were seeking?

CBB: I put “Child” at the end of the book because I felt like people had to do the hard work to get to the most intimate part! As a British person, I am not accustomed to being overly vulnerable with my emotions and even though I think there is so much power in emotional intimacy—with one another and with our readers—it does not come naturally! I felt it was important for people to first understand the larger systemic issues I was referencing and understand my adult experience, which is also a reflection of so many other Black queer people’s experiences. Then we could go down the rabbit hole into my past!

I also saw it as a reflection of how much access people have to me. As a “public figure” (I still cringe at the idea of this but I also have to recognize the responsibility and privilege that comes with my social position and capital), I constantly feel exposed, easily accessible to everyone at any time. This is extremely exhausting—people feel they can ask me anything, comment on everything I do and say and wear, even when it’s unsolicited. I felt with the this structuring of the book I was able to take back some control—assuming people read it in order—and invite people into my deepest memories and truths at my own pace.

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Cicely Belle Blain is a Black, multi-racial, queer writer, activist and CEO from London, UK. Cicely Belle is noted for founding Black Lives Matter Vancouver and subsequently being listed as one of Vancouver’s 50 most powerful people by Vancouver Magazine twice, BC Business’s 30 under 30, and one of Refinery29’s Powerhouses of 2020. They are now the CEO of Bakau Consulting, an anti-racism consulting company with over 1000 clients worldwide. Cicely Belle is also an instructor in Executive Leadership at Simon Fraser University and the Editorial Director of Ripple of Change Magazine. They are the author of Burning Sugar (Arsenal Pulp Press and VS Books) which was recently longlisted for the 2021 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.

Playfulness and Gravitas: An Interview with Jillian Christmas

The following interview is the sixth in a seven-part series of conversations with BC poets which I released in April 2020. All seven interviews were originally posted at ReadLocalBC.ca. This was the second year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read the 2019 interviews here).

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An excerpt from “hard to tell if this is just the internet, or another dream where I am in front of the class in only my dirty underwear” – Jillian Christmas

i.
Jillian is feeling … Jillian is … Jillian …
wasn’t the only one who got a little too excited
about a new facebook status “back in the day”
safe to say none of us knew any better
safe to say I was ahead of my time in the feeling-myself department
newly imagining me, a writer, with a reputation to create
I needed to appear busy, desirable, productive
what brilliant and profound statement could
be the messaging for this soon-to-be-published
high-functioning persona?
Jillian is … busy writing
satisfied with my own genius I sign out
presumably to watch reruns of judge judy
several hours later my best friend calls me
wonders if I know that “writting” isn’t a word

Reprinted with permission from 
The Gospel of Breaking by Jillian Christmas
(Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020).

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Rob Taylor: In “Talking with Ancestors After the Show” you write “if there is a moment this is it / know better than to beg a minute’s sojourn // reminder to the artist: this is it.” I can imagine so vividly that line being delivered in a spoken word performance, and how it might resonate differently (and, in some ways, similarly) in that context. That Venn diagram between the “stage” moment and the “page” moment — their audiences, their performative spaces, their “voices,” their ephemerality.

As a writer whose background is in spoken word, how have you found the experience of putting your words, often first meant for public performance, onto the page? What have you been able to bring over with you, and what have you had to leave behind? What new opportunities has writing for the page granted you?

Jillian Christmas: I love that you frame them as opportunities. When I first approached the challenge it seemed to present itself as a fear of what would be lost, what eye contact or small facial expression would be missed and what emotional information would go with it. But your framing is absolutely correct, somewhere along the process, I discovered that it was in fact a great joy, almost a game, to figure out what choices I could make on the page that uplift the poem to a similar effect as I would have on the stage. In some places I learned that the voice of the page poem would be different, more concerned with shape, spacing, or a leaning, possibly tumbling word. In some places a more direct translation would occur, a long slender diving presentation, where my voice might have dipped or swayed (as in “But Have You Tried”). In the end I decided that there were no limits to my choices, allowing each poem to have as many lives as it needs, perhaps one for the page, a longer more lyrical or repetitive version for the stage reading, perhaps a third snappy edit for tucking inside the nest of the perfect song. A multitude of mechanisms to coax every bit of connective tissue from any given piece.


Rob: On this theme of connection, do you think about your audience differently when writing for the page than when writing for the stage? Does that distance — the loss of the aforementioned facial expressions; not hearing the crowd laugh or gasp or cheer — change what you want to say or how you want to say it?

Jillian: One thing I’ve learned from years of performance, is that you never know who might be in your audience. Who happened into the room that night? Who was led in, unexpectedly, by a poetically-inclined friend? Who might find your book or some recording passing across their desk? My audience is almost always a mystery to me, but you learn to read a room, to select the next poem or the movement of a rise and fall, depending on what the room needs, or what energy is being exchanged there. On the page, that immediate feedback is absent, but there is still opportunity to create an arc, a flow that moves the reader from one emotional landscape to another. As for the applause, I have an excellent imagination.


Rob: Ha! Yes, that comes in handy. I was certainly nodding along (the reading equivalent of applause?), and sometimes chuckling, as I read through The Gospel of Breaking.

In “Black Feminist” you write:

They said I could be a feminist too!
after all, they are going to need someone at the meeting
who knows how to tighten up
all those white girl dreadlocks

and in “Northern Light”:

what strange things are we creatures
of the Diaspora treasures
of the Caribbean Sea,
knocking our knees together in parkas

Poems like these are drawn from your perspective as someone who inhabits two distinctly different parts of the African diaspora: Vancouver and Trinidad and Tobago (where people of African descent make up 36% of the population, compared to 1% in Vancouver). Notably, neither of those places is the United States, which tends to dominate conversations about the North American African diaspora. How do you think the experience in each country have informed how you think about the other and, more widely, about what it means to be black in the diaspora in the 21st Century?

Jillian: I often wonder what people imagine when they think of the word “home”. I’ve used that word to describe so many places that I’m sure anyone listening could easily get confused. Perhaps that is the skill set of people who move and have been moved across great distances: the ability to make home within whatever is in reach, to call up history and memory from an unfamiliar skyline.

I can’t say what it means to be a member of the black diaspora in the 21st century, the experiences are vast. But I know that the land that I live on is not mine, that it has been cared for and considered sacred long before my arrival, and that I am grateful for each moment I get to call it home. I know that through solidarity with Indigenous communities I can work to excise the hovering feeling of displacement (mine and others), and locate myself as a useful piece in this moment in time, which is a kind of home that cannot evade me.


Rob: Speaking of hovering feelings of displacement, what has performing and publishing your poetry to largely white, Canadian audiences taught you about your role in the cultural and political life of the country?

Jillian: For certain it has taught me that I cannot allow whiteness to define or direct my role as a writer and creative, which is and always has been the same as any artist, to speak about what I experience and imagine, to question, to disrupt, to channel and unveil — to dream freedom where there was none.

If anyone has said it better than the great Audre Lorde herself, I have yet to hear it: “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”


Rob: I love those responses — both yours and Lorde’s. When it comes to defining yourself for yourself, in The Gospel of Breaking you write honestly and openly about a number of subjects that would have been taboo a generation ago, or perhaps still are now, including sexuality, race and mental health.

The tension in trying to speak about these subjects with those on the “outside” is present in a number of your poems — I think here particularly of your poem about Robin Williams’ suicide (“do you know what it is to think of the thing a hundred times before coffee / to make the bed anyway”). How do you reconcile the range of readers for a given poem (the “insiders” who know it all and want to hear it spoken, the “outsiders” who know very little but hopefully want to learn, etc.)? Or do you not think about it at all? Do you prioritise a particular audience when you write, and simply let others listen in?

Jillian: That’s an interesting dynamic you bring up, between the insider and the outsider. I can’t say that it occurred to me quite like that, though I can see that it is present, hopefully not static or unmovable. When I think about writing those lines I’m reminded of how little we ever know about each other’s experiences of the world. Who is in fact an outsider, to the experience of loss, or mental illness? Who is an insider to the feeling of isolation? Some questions that appear to be asked hypothetically are, in fact, earnest. What do you know of rest or the needing of it? What do I know? Could we possibly speak of those things honestly? Can we unveil for ourselves and each other the losses we carry to discover understanding, and maybe even collective healing? I hope so.


Rob: I like how your answer here embraces the slipperiness of “knowing.” That’s a theme in a number of the book’s poems, where you write very insightfully about the plasticity of memory. At one point you describe depression as “the disease of our memories either we remember too / much darkness or we forget too much light.”

In addition to mental health’s ability to warp our memories, a writer is always rearranging their memories as they excavate them and turn them into art. What do you think the writing, performing, and publishing of your memories has done to them? Do you think you’ve made them lighter or darker? Do you see yourself in these poems, or someone adjacent to yourself, or someone different entirely?

Jillian: I’ve always been fascinated by the worlds we create with our memories, the alternate universes we all suspend. I remember hearing once that each time we remember a moment we change it just a little, we colour it with our current emotion or perspective, some new lens that wasn’t there in the moment of making. I’ve spent time worrying about that, called my own mother to check the validity of one recollection or another, found myself soothed when our stories map neatly onto each other. More and more often, I find myself surprised when they do.

I try in my writing to speak from my experience but to leave room for the experiences that I could only ever imagine. I most certainly have coloured memories with my own emotional imprints, some lighter, some darker, but all true to my experience of them — and hopefully none so etched in stone that I cannot make room to see the many versions of myself who have pressed them into story.


Rob: On this theme of “many versions of yourself,” the poems in The Gospel of Breaking about your time in Trinidad and Tobago often feature titles in parentheses (i.e. “(no gift like a loosened fist)” or “(sugar plum)”). Could you talk about this choice, and the distinction you aim for it to bring into these poems?

Jillian: As a child of immigrant parents, a first generation “Canadian” growing up on Indigenous land, the shaping of my cultural knowledge came both from the small everyday expressions of phrase or flavour, as well as the short trips that I took “home” to collect pieces of my heritage from the mouth of my grandmother or aunty. The pieces in parentheses all hold stories from these times. The parentheses are meant to illustrate what it is to carry only small pieces, sometimes compartmentalized, sometimes foreign even to myself, but still an integral part of the puzzle.


Rob: Sticking with formal choices, the poems in The Gospel of Breaking take on a wide variety of shapes and sizes — for every longer poem designed for three-minute delivery at a poetry slam there’s a very short poem; for every prose-like block of text there’s a thin, line-break-filled offering. Could you talk a bit about how you came to the shapes of your various poems? When you originally wrote the poems which were performed at slams, was the shape of the poem still important to you (even if no one would see it), or was that a consideration you had to come to later as you worked your way toward this book?

Jillian: I always consider shape when bringing a poem to life. However, the shape is important for different reasons. When preparing for the stage, I will study my poem from a page version that has been broken down into segments that will help to imprint and inform what will come next. It is a memorization tool. If I can create markers that make a visual impact in my memory of the poem, it will assist in those moments on stage where the next line feels stuck or frozen. I remember the page, the layout, the rhythm. In the book, those shapes are meant to stand in for my body, my face, my voice. The ebb and flow that the audience would hear are invisible on the page, so I try to offer direction, a structure that feels like a fit for each piece.


Rob: You use rhyme powerfully (and often playfully) in The Gospel of Breaking, especially in the longer poems. I often find that collections by poets with a background in spoken word show a greater facility and comfort with using rhyme than those by page-only poets. Even within a single book, the longer poems that most likely originated as spoken word pieces seem to use rhyme more frequently, and more playfully, than the shorter poems. It’s as though using rhyme is “ok” with a live audience, but should only be dipped into hesitantly on the page.

Why do you use rhyme? What effect do you hope for it to have on the listener/reader? Did you feel a need to dampen down your use of rhyme in The Gospel of Breaking compared to what you’d perform on the stage?

Jillian: Rhyme seems to me like a tool that shines especially bright on the stage. A mechanism for holding the audience in a trance, taking them on a long and winding ride, but offering a tether for them to hold onto. Something somewhat reliable. However my one rule for using rhyme has nothing at all to do with page vs stage, or with the length of the piece.

I love for rhyme to live everywhere, including everyday speech. My one rule, and the rule I often offer in workshop, is that if I can predict the rhyme that is coming next, it’s better to choose a new one. I use that lens for my writing, and I am not always perfectly within its scope. However, I think the worst offence a rhyme can commit is predictability. Certainly each of us is guilty of that on occasion.


Rob: Ha! Oh no, never!

You ran Vancouver’s Verses Festival of Words, which bridges the gap between Vancouver’s spoken word and page poetry communities, for a number of years. What influence do you think that work had on your writing/performance? Having built the Verses festival into such a success, what do you think Vancouver’s poetry community is most in need of next?

Jillian: I have been incredibly lucky, over years of curation, to connect with folks who have been inspirations and heroes to me. It has reminded me that I am one sparkling thread in this expansive weave of peers and mentors, friends and students, performers and organizers. It has encouraged me not to fix myself to any one role, but to move fluidly through the many iterations of myself, to foster playfulness and gravitas.

Vancouver has held and continues to hold an incredible wealth of creative energy. In this interesting time of isolation, I think that what we all need are reminders of how deeply and intrinsically connected we are to each other.

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Jillian Christmas lives on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam people, where she served for six years as Artistic Director of Verses Festival of Words. An educator, organizer, and advocate in the arts community, utilizing an anti-oppressive lens, Jillian has performed and facilitated workshops across the continent.

BC Poetry 2017: "a place called No Homeland" by Kai Cheng Thom (Arsenal Pulp Press)

autopsky

someday they’ll cut this body open
and discover that my flesh is made of sky:
azure, sapphire, cerulean, turquoise, ultramarine
indigo
violet
black
cirrus and cumulus clouds stirring behind my eyes
cumulonimubus, alight with lightning,
crackling through the capillaries of the heart.
i am oh so full of rain
you could fall through me into forever. 
please,
dear scientist, mortuary explorer, search me thoroughly
tenderly catalogue all my wayward parts.
find somewhere in me
the forgotten moon, the faded stars.
re-member, reassemble, this tattered heaven, this
shattered
celestial thing.

Who?

Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, performance artist, and psychotherapist in Toronto. Her novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir was released by Metonymy Press in 2016 and her picture book for children From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea (illustrated by Kai Yun Ching and Wai-Yant Li) will be published by Arsenal Pulp Press in Fall 2017.


What?

In these fierce yet tender narrative poems, Kai Cheng Thom draws equally from memory and mythology to create new maps of gender, race, sexuality, and violence. In the world of a place called No Homeland, the bodies of the marginalized—queer and transgender communities, survivors of abuse and assault, and children of diaspora—are celebrated, survival songs are sung, and the ancestors offer you forgiveness for not remembering their names.

Descended from the traditions of oral storytelling, spoken word, and queer punk poetry, Kai Cheng Thom’s debut collection is evocative and unforgettable.


When?

Arrives May 2017


Where?

Book Launches: Sounds Like Fire: Femme4Femme, April 25th (Tomorrow!), 8PM, Verses Festival, The Cutch, Vancouver. Get tickets here!

Purchases: From the Arsenal Pulp Press website or at your local bookstore. $14.95.


How?

Creating new maps of gender, race, sexuality, and violence.

Arsenal Pulp Press * About This Series * More Books, Please!

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.