Witness Back at Me: mis-mothering & transmigration

(Paperback)

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In Witness Back at Me, Weyman Chan continues to explore themes of dislocation and belonging by drawing on biography, myth, science, and the everyday. Chans poetry is suffused with a collage-like immersion of stream-of-conscious voices, approximating the kaleidoscopic effect of interior thought.

Witness Back at Me draws on the childhood loss of Chans mother to breast cancer, as a survival mechanism towards an aesthetics of accepted disembodiment, always haunted by a search for nurturing and surrender to some greater being. The poems in this book intertwine polyvocally, building into a liminal biographical metanarrative: the whole point of existence, the author believes, is to luxuriate in the greater being of not-knowing. To accept the historical underpinnings, the brokenness of the world, inside and outside the self, but be in constant communication of both worlds, towards understanding and healing, is the one true meaningful quest.

Author Bio

Weyman Chan continues to explore themes of dislocation and belonging by drawing on biography, myth, science, and the everyday . The author of five previous books of poetry, his work has been shortlisted for the Acorn-Plantos Award for Peoples Poetry, the W.O. Mitchell Book Prize, and the Governor Generals Literary Awards. He is the 2021 recipient of the Latner Writers Trust Poetry Prize.