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My Funeral Gondola

My Funeral Gondola is Sze-Lorrain's second book of poetry.

It is published* as a Mãnoa Books title from El León Literary Arts.

Cover Image: Nuages (détail), Claude Monet
Musée de l'Orangerie - Paris, France

*Date of Publication: May 20, 2013

Read some poems:

Sixteen Lines, Autumn 2010 (PDF)
Karma (PDF)
My Melancholy
When the Title Took Its Life (PDF)
Scarlet (PDF)
Jeux d'eau (PDF)

Read "Still in the Night Fields of Hokkaido" in Verse Daily*
*A stanza is misaligned; click for the rightful version (PDF).
 

Purchase the book: www.spdbooks.org | www.amazon.com | www.bookdepository.co.uk (free shipping)

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Reviews/Articles

The Rumpus
Mãnoa: A Pacific Journal of International Literature
Hazel & Wren
Tales from the Reading Room
rob mclennan's blog
Blue Lyra Review I / II (Interview)
Arcadia Magazine
Asian American Press
CutBank
Off the Coast
Mascara Literary Review
Lantern Review
Poetry Salzburg Review (Print)
Triquarterly (Interview)
The Antigonish Review (Print)
Barn Owl Review
Los Angeles Review of Books

A playful, Zen-like clarity and gentleness characterize the poems in Fiona Sze-Lorrain's new book, along with a distinct sense of an animating mystery. The world here is at once deliciously material and refreshingly ethereal. This is an engaging collection, resonant with promise and presence.  Peter Cole

In a trance cast by the flickering shadows of woods and sun, a coffin rides the dark waters of the imagination. So, too, these poems navigate the swells of loss. It is said that grief is our most dangerous emotion, eliciting from us the desire to follow our loved ones into death. Yet not much is said of the dying one does in life in response to it: "I settle where the wind / blows me. From one state of gratitude / to another province." I recognize this speech, haunting and strange, the speech of true poets, who surface from the pain place irreparably change.  Melissa Kwasny

This exquisite collection sounds a counterpoint of firmament and terra firma, "an air / between real and improvised time." Opening her astute ear to the "Cryptic shapes of yes and no," Sze-Lorrain imbues her poems with a plaintive beauty, her language with a subtle complexity.  Sylvia Legris

In moving poems that affirm the power of language:

     "Say orchids. (You’re orchids.)

      Say the forbidden. (You're the forbidden.)"

Sze-Lorrain journeys through shifting places and times, deaths and imagined deaths, with sharp, lyrical insight.  Arthur Sze