TENDER: Selected Poems

By Laiwan

Within the contours of TENDER lie field notes from a life lived across multiple affinities, kinships, and desires. Equally visual and textual, TENDER is a beautifully complex collection spanning thirty years of curious inquiry into our shared human–animal condition. Laiwan traverses diverse terrains – the body, land, language – which are rooted in her courageous and uncompromising history of activism and in experiences of building community across and beyond difference. TENDER offers a radical and decolonizing cleansing of all that oppresses and alienates. The words and images in this collection reveal the heroic struggles of gendered, raced, and sexual differences from a place of incredible tenderness and vulnerability. Laiwan’s words imprint in us the need to breathe our animal skins back to life after the scarring of fearful states of abandonment and betrayal. Read as a retrospective and as a continued call for a passionate caring for one another, TENDER offers us freedom in the face of limitation: a working at setting free. Each section of the book captures a moment in time and feeling. Ghostly images are choreographed to leave us alerted to longing and hope, absence and presence. It is as if the entire collection were a garden at different stages of growth, with the inevitable decay and renewal that each season brings. Haunting, political, and defiantly sexy, Laiwan’s voice is a guiding force.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Aug 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781772012767

Laiwan

Laiwan is a visual artist, writer, activist, thinker, speaker, and educator in Vancouver, British Columbia. It has been said that she is reticent and modest, shying away from the spectacular, and these traits may belie the cosmopolitan and eclectic sources of her thought, as what she produces is so often surprising, even in its exploration of the ephemeral. Her biography usually mentions a background of displacement; yet Laiwan has chosen to be based in Vancouver for decades, focusing on the local, where she is well known as an artist and as founder of the OR Gallery. Of Chinese ancestry, she grew up first in apartheid Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), with early schooling by German nuns; then, when her family relocated to Canada, she had the life of a teenager in East Vancouver, attending Britannia Secondary School where she learned to work the printing press. To make sense of things, she stumbled into poetry. Educated at the Emily Carr College of Art and Design, encountering the punk and art-folk-rock music scenes, she later gained an MFA from Simon Fraser University. She teaches in the United States. Talonbooks published Tender in 2020.

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