Jump to Site Map |  Skip Navigation and read main content
Fiona Sze Emblem

writings:

Home: Fiona Sze

» poetry

Image: Water the Moon

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, I 
Web Del Sol, II 
(PDF 78KB)
Off the Coast (PDF 78KB)
Poetry International (PDF 856KB)
Galatea Resurrects
Prick of the Spindle 
FutureCycle Poetry 
(PDF 356KB)
berniE-zine (PDF 750KB)
The Smoking Poet (Zinta Reviews)
Tipton Poetry Review
Tryst Book Reviews
Literary Aficionado 
(PDF 188KB)
Lantern Review
Melusine
Between the Lines
Gender across Borders
Cerise Press

Interviews

Between the Lines
Columbia Spectator
Quarterly Literary Review Singapore 
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