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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

 

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