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About Water the Moon
Sze-Lorrain's debut collection of poetry, Water the Moon, was published by Marick in February 2010.
Read some poems: mascarareview.com
Read "Invisible Eye" in Verse Daily.
Purchase Water the Moon: www.amazon.com
Reviews
Open Letters
CutBank
Poetry London (PDF 116KB)
Prairie Schooner (PDF 2MB)
Elevate Difference
Evergreen Review
Web Del Sol
Off the Coast
Poetry International (856KB)
Galatea Resurrects
Prick of the Spindle
FutureCycle Poetry
berniE-zine
The Smoking Poet (Zinta Reviews)
Tipton Poetry Review
Tryst Book Reviews
Literary Aficionado
Lantern Review
Melusine
Between the Lines
Gender across Borders
Cerise Press
Retort Magazine
How delicate and mysterious, empathetically open and spiritually anchored… they are. Searching to know and to feel intimately… These things I admire so much. The poems, when I think about them—like remembering a landscape—seem full of clarity, like the full moon. If the moon had bones, maybe they would be these poems… Tess Gallagher
A kind of "Ponts des Arts," these cosmopolitan and compassionate poems span worlds, are rich in startling images, in appetites sharpened by a knowledge of hunger, abstractions perceived as objects moving in a changing light. Water the Moon marks the welcome arrival to our poetry of a cross-culturally complex protean and nuanced new voice—a stunning debut. Eleanor Wilner
In Fiona Sze-Lorrain's poems, an intelligent tenderness pivots back and forth between her listeners and all her varied homelands. As we hear her quiet, allusive syntax, we seem to partake of an extraordinary renewal, as she reviews, sees anew her generative sources. She manages to turns her experiences into ours, with a generosity few lyric poets seem to have—the poems as an open door... She shuns the exotic and the pretty, and instead invokes the Asia she comes from by making her Europe just as precise, exactingly demanding, accurate—language and trope... "Her eyes tell a story / different from their tears—" it is that sort of richness that makes her poems stay in mind. Robert Kelly
Sze-Lorrain's poetry is fascinating for its bold ability to situate a reader in the midst of multicultural issues and flairs. Writing as if observing herself at the center of each poem's drama, she states, "Toughest to travel is the distance / between two people." An impressive quality of insights and wits, this unique first collection is one of my best reading surprises. Nguyen Do
Honorable Mention: 2011 Eric Hoffer Book Award in Poetry
Highly energetic and visionary in its dynamic blend of Western and Asian sensuality and heritage, this debut poetry collection by Fiona Sze-Lorrain carries the voice of a polyglot whose cross-cultural experiences in exile embrace the world with a penetrating eye and illuminating wits.
At once tender and grounded, Water the Moon inhabits places in Asia and Europe that are both ancient and modern, political and intimate. Drawing inspiration from travel, food, artistic dialogue, struggles and renewed passion in Paris and New York, these delicious poems transcend the limits of memory, striking a fine balance between imagination and reality with intensity, grace and many surprises.
In “Biography of Hunger,” part I of her first book of poetry, Fiona Sze-Lorrain dislodges difficult memories and records recollections of oppression. These sad reminders of disconcerting passages and historical deprivations are a contrast to the sensory pleasures, of the arts, travel and food, often described in her later poems. The world spanning work by this young, multi-talented artist connects the dots, locates the affinities, and educates the reader in the rich cultural blend of her experience. In a strange, lovely way, by recalling so specifically and writing with such an intimate sensibility, Sze-Lorrain forecasts the ever-changing global vista we can anticipate for our newborn twenty-first century.
Cover Image: Nuages (détail), Claude Monet. Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris, France.