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New
Dear Chrysanthemums
A Novel in Stories
Out from Scribner on May 2, 2023
Longlisted for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
Watch the book trailer
Featured in New York Times Book Review
Prepub Alert in Library Journal | Also featured in What to Read in 2023 | LJ's Annual Books Preview
Read reviews in Kirkus Reviews | Publishers Weekly | Booklist | Shelf Awareness | Asian Review of Books | Mekong Review | Mochi Magazine | No Man Is an Island (New Bloom Magazine) | Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism | Soapberry Review | Reading Chinese Network Reviews (The Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing) | Georgia Review
Watch a book talk "Diaspora Unfurled" at the American Library in Paris
Listen to a podcast interview in the Asian Review of Books | New Books Network
Watch a podcast interview on The World of Chinese
Read an interview by Tsering Yangzom Lama in Asymptote
Read a conversation with Shawna Yang Ryan in Singapore Unbound (Suspect)
Read more interviews in Asian Books Blog | NüVoices | FUSAC (Paris)
Featured on Page One program, KSUT Radio
Online Purchase: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Books-A-Million | Bookshop
Please consider ordering it from your local bookshops.
Also in Kindle | Audiobook (narrated by Catherine Ho)
Read reviews in AudioFile Magazine | Booklist
Recent
Rain in Plural
Catalog Press Release | Watch a film here
Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, 2020
Starred Review in Library Journal: Longing and Speech: Nine Major Poetry Collections from Writers Veteran and New
Shortlisted for the 2021 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry
Read Sze-Lorrain's essay "How Each Line Appears | some loose leaves" in Princeton Ideas
More Than Allusion: Interview by William Sharpe at Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination
Watch a filmed reading of "Not Meant as Poems," performed by Oscar Olivo
From One Wound, How to Navigate Another: Interview with Dan Beachy-Quick by H.L. Hix at Inquire
Featured title in Asian American Poetry Unbound Lantern Review's "October APA Poetry Companion—Books to Curl Up with for Fall"
Read reviews in Poetry London, Asian Review of Books, Center for Literary Publishing (Colorado Review), Quill and Parchment, the Adroit Journal, EcoTheo Review, Singapore Unbound, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and Harvard Review.
Featured in Yaddo News
Read a poem "Strand" in The Literary Hub.
"Macabre Dance" is featured on Poetry Daily.
Read an interview at Off the Coast.
For online purchases, order at the press, here, here, or here.
Or from bookstores Barnes and Noble, Labyrinth Books, Green Apple Books, Strand, Indiebound . . .
Please consider ordering it from your local bookshops.
Recent
Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm
Poems and Essays by Yu Xiuhua
Translated from the Chinese by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Published by Astra House, September 2021
Order here.
Read reviews in The Washington Post, the Poetry Foundation Harriet Books, the Great Book Wyrm, West Trade Review, The World of Chinese, the Asian Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, Culture and Dialogue, and Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism.
Featured in The New York Times' Globetrotting, Words without Borders' Watchlist, Medium, and Space between Pages.
"Rain Falls outside the Window" is featured on Poetry Daily.
Listen to an interview on The Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast.
Recent
A Blue Dark
Ink Paintings by Fritz Horstman | Poems and Translations by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Published by Vif Éditions, 2019 (on the occasion of the summer exhibition at the Institute Library in New Haven, Connecticut)
Read more in New Haven Independent and The Arts Paper.
Read an interview in Poetry Society of America.
Watch a short promotional video | View photos of the exhibition.
View some of the artwork on Cahiers at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination.
Limited Edition US$22 (+ $14 shipping); 21€
To purchase: info@vif-editions.com or phf.lorrain@orange.fr
Poetry
The Ruined Elegance
Named one of Library Journal's Best Books 2015: Poetry and Top Fall Indie Poetry
Finalist for the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize
Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, 2016
Read an interview and a poem on Princeton's blog, and learn more about the poem "Towering" from Poetry Society of America.
Read and listen to the poem "Transparent" from Princeton's Poem in Your Pocket Day National Poetry Month 2016.
Listen to the poem "Given Silence" from Princeton's Poem in Your Pocket Day National Poetry Month 2018.
Read reviews in The Rumpus, Library Journal, Pamplemousse, Arcadia, CutBank, Asian Review of Books, Columbia College Today, Lantern Review, The Antigonish Review, The American Poetry Review, The Literary Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and West Branch.
One of Maureen McLane's "Seven Poets on the Verge" in Vela
Recent
Karma by Yin Lichuan
Translated from the Chinese
Published by Tolsun Books, May 2020
This is a bilingual collection of poems by contemporary Chinese poet and filmmaker Yin Lichuan.
Order at Small Press Distribution, Amazon, or Tolsun.
Read some poems in New England Review and Cahiers at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination.
"Life Should Have Been So Serious" is a featured poem on Poetry Daily.
Read more about Karma in this interview, From One Wound, How to Navigate Another (with Dan Beachy-Quick) by H.L. Hix at Inquire.
Read a micro-review in the Kenyon Review.
Read reviews in the Asian Review of Books and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.
Recent
Green Mountain by Yang Jian
Translated from the Chinese
Foreword by Christopher Merrill
Green Mountain compiles a representative selection of lyrical poems by contemporary Chinese poet and painter Yang Jian, also a Buddhist, in Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s elegant translation. Exploring history, faith, memory, nature, and the various transient complexities of human existence, these poems seek a pure form of simplicity in thought and style, reminiscent of meditative beauty and Asian ink-wash painting aesthetics.
Order at University of Hawai'i Press or Amazon.
Read reviews in Asian Review of Books and Quill and Parchment.
Read an interview in Poetry Northwest.
"Surveying from Mount Dongliang" is featured on Poetry Daily.
Recent
My Mountain Country by Ye Lijun
Translated from the Chinese
Foreword by Christopher Merrill
Published by World Poetry Books, August 2019
Shortlisted for the 2020 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry
In this remarkable English debut, award-winning Chinese contemporary poet Ye Lijun offers readers a lyrical diorama of nature and the inner world. By turns intimate and profound, Ye’s poems in Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s masterful translations make music of everyday silences, and illuminate the invisible openings in our lives. In this vital collection by one of China’s essential literary voices, each encounter is an invitation, wherein a village, a nest, a telescope, or a book proves to be a transient guide to the unknown.
Read about the translator's thoughts on Ye's poem "Backyard" in Poetry Society of America.
Read a few other poems in Poetry Northwest and New Poetry in Translation.
Read an interview with Ye Lijun, "Living and Writing in Lishui" in Kenyon Review, and an interview with Sze-Lorrain in Lantern Review.
Read reviews in the Asian Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Literary Review, Center for Literary Publishing, The Los Angeles Review, and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.
Featured poem at Poetry Society of America's Calling the World.
Featured poem in Poetry Daily [read also a short commentary in newsletter]
Poetry
Not Meant as Poems
by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Published by The Green Violin |
Le Violon Vert in Montreal, Canada, 2018
Handmade chapbook | pamphlet
Illustrations by Rem Stahl
Limited Edition
Read the poem in Poetry Northwest.
Translations
Trace by Yu Xiang
Translated from the Chinese
Ji'nan, August 2017
Handmade chapbook
(limited edition)
Read two poems in InTranslation.
Sea Summit by Yi Lu
Translated from the Chinese
Foreword by Melissa Kwasny
Milkweed Editions, January 2016
Finalist for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award (Poetry)
Chosen by the Center for Courage & Renewal as one of the Favorite Courageous Books of 2016 for Poetry
Poet-scenographer Yi Lu's Sea Summit is a collection of paradox and questioning. The sea is an impossible force to the poet: it is both a majestic force that predates man, and something to carry with us wherever we go, to be put "by an ancient rattan chair," so we can watch "its waves toss" from above. Exploring the current ecological crisis and our complicated relationship to the wildness around us, Yi Lu finds something more complex than a traditional nature poet might in the mysterious connection between herself and the forces of nature represented by the boundless ocean.
Read reviews in Publishers Weekly | Three Percent ["Why This Book Should Win"] | Asian Review of Books | The Literary Review | The Los Angeles Review | CutBank | Heavy Feather Review.
Read a short essay in Asian Review of Books.
Read a related interview with the translator in Foreword Reviews.
Read an interview with the poet in Poetry Society of America.
Poetry
My Funeral Gondola
In her second book of poetry, Fiona Sze-Lorrain writes about rifts and departures, memory and experience. With lyricism and restraint, her poems meditate on the bittersweet struggles and inner intensities of a solitary life.
Like a vessel moving smoothly on an impressionistic surface, My Funeral Gondola explores time and language, suggesting the dark shapes and emotional currents beneath.
Click here or here (or here) to buy.
More in Poetry »
Anthologies
Starry Island:
New Writing from Singapore
Starry Island (University of Hawai'i Press, 2014) presents essays, fiction, and poetry that express the complex tensions and interconnections of Singapore. These writings by two dozen writers include meditative essays, satire, magical realist fiction, and lyric poetry. Click here to buy.
More in Anthologies »
On Freedom:
Spirit, Art, and State
The various meanings of freedom are difficult to clarify in the discursive language of theory and philosophy. This anthology, On Freedom (University of Hawai'i Press, 2013) includes fiction, essays and poetry by authors residing throughout North America and Asia who explore the need for cultural, spiritual and intellectual freedoms in a fully-realized life. Click here or here to buy.
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Sky Lanterns: New Poetry from China, Formosa, and Beyond
Sky Lanterns (University of Hawai'i Press, 2012) brings together innovative poetry, essays, and fiction by 23 authors—primarily poets—in China, Taiwan, the United States, and beyond who are engaged in truth-seeking, resistance, and renewal. Click here or here to buy.
More in Anthologies »
© Triangle
Méditerranée
Silhouette/Shadow:
The Cinematic Art of Gao Xingjian
Combining poetry and prose with over eighty pages of illustrations, this book contains new poetry, images, and essays written by the 2000 Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature, Gao Xingjian and his film collaborators, Alain Melka and Jean-Louis Darmyn. This is the first print documentation that focuses on Gao's artistic expression in the film world.
With a preface written by the editor Fiona Sze-Lorrain, it also contains a new essay by Gao on his cinematic craft (translated from the Chinese by Mabel Lee) and the unabridged version of the poem "The Way of the Wandering Bird" (translated from the French by Ned Burgess and Sze-Lorrain).
More in Books »
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Dear Chrysanthemums
The exquisite debut novel by poet Fiona Sze-Lorrain has now arrived. Dear Chrysanthemums aesthetic ambitions of a novel with lyrical prose and imagery. Of course literature isn’t just symbolism or allegorical truth; it also imparts cultural history, reveals its passage. Through plot and narrative in this novel, Sze-Lorrain probes into our complex, volatile society, expressing her thought and lucidity. Ma Jian, author of China Dream, The Dark Road, and Beijing Coma
I read this book with my heart in my throat. Taken one by one, each of these delectable stories offers an intimate, sensuous portrait of the life of otherwise mysterious girls and women, their desires and obsessions and griefs. Taken as a whole, the novel is a heady, energetic, global mosaic that conveys just how deeply one human soul can relate to another. Susanna Daniel, author of Sea Creatures and Stiltsville
Just beneath the precisely-rendered quotidian world of these linked narratives lies a fathomless well of menace. Given this, Sze-Lorrain seems to ask, what are life’s chances? Frederick Turner, author of The Go-Between: A Novel of the Kennedy Years and 1929: A Novel of the Jazz Age
Dear Chrysanthemums weaves together the stories of Asian women whose lives are shaped, with and without their knowledge, by the storm of history and cultural upheaval. The political is always personal in this remarkable debut, in which the practice of art—dance, music, writing, even the art of cooking—is opposed to oppression, violence, loneliness, displacement, and death. With uncompromising detail, in language that is at once precise and evocative, author Sze-Lorrain takes us inside the individual struggles of her characters to reveal fascinating patterns of connection and hidden truth. Mary Helen Stefaniak, author of The World of Pondside and The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia
How can a book be simultaneously so beautiful and so heartbreaking? Dear Chrysanthemums explores the repercussions of the major events of modern Chinese history—the Chinese civil war, the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square massacre—as they echo throughout lives in the diaspora. Sze-Lorrain’s storytelling is graceful yet fierce—this is an important novel about histories that have changed the world. Shawna Yang Ryan, author of Green Island and Water Ghosts
In Dear Chrysanthemums, Fiona Sze-Lorrain collects the shards of modern Chinese history and builds a prismatic, gorgeously intimate story of women who face impossible choices and losses in order to survive. Unflinching and haunting, the novel is a vivid portrayal of disillusionment and exile. Step by step, Sze-Lorrain constructs an intricate and deeply moving web that will leave you stunned by the end. Tsering Yangzom Lama, author of We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies, shortlisted for the 2022 Giller Prize
Rain in Plural
Dazzling Fiona Sze-Lorrain refreshes our sense of time in her newest volume, the marvelously manifold Rain in Plural. Here, where the sea can be kept in a box, an airport has a skeleton and a nervous system, and both a wedding and heart surgery are scheduled 'to put the past behind,' she also transforms our sense of space. As if this poet were employing watercolor techniques, Sze-Lorrain builds up her drolly profound images. From 'a favorite samurai' to a dictator's dog, in the brilliant polycultural world she conjures we're suddenly everywhere at once, making Rain in Plural a book to absorb as one absorbs a vision. Molly Peacock
Rain in Plural is a cause for celebration. In recent years, when the world has become too wearying for me, I’ve looked to the poetry of Fiona Sze-Lorrain for her inventive lyricism and her radiant intelligence. There is an exquisite music in this work that is unlike anything else in contemporary poetry. The elegant psychological narratives of these poems can be both troubling and consoling, yet they emerge as compellingly as one’s own suppressed dreams. Sze-Lorrain’s poetry exists in an artistic landscape that echoes Antonioni’s sensual intellectual acuity as well as Eric Rohmer’s bemused tenderness. Rain in Plural is a collection of glorious and absolute brilliance. David St. John
A Blue Dark (Vif Éditions, 2019)
A Blue Dark (Vif Éditions, 2019)
Longlisted for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
Dear Chrysanthemums (Scribner, 2023)
