Poems that reckon with identity, race, and fractured relationships through the lens of food.

Bittersweet, numbingly spicy, herbal and milky, Familial Hungersis a lyric feast. Ginger scallion fish, Sichuan peppercorns, ginseng tea, Chinese school and white chefs - the reader's appetite is satiated with these poems' complex palate. There are the bubbling expectations for immigrant daughters, the chewy strands of colonial critique, and dissolving crystals of language loss. Wu relentlessly searches the grocery shelves for the hard-to-digest ingredients of identity and belonging, offering us her nourishing honesty and courage pulled from the marrow.

Christine Wu's profile page

Christine Wu is a Chinese-Canadian poet who was born and raised on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh (Vancouver, BC). She has a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria, a MLIS from Dalhousie University, and a MA in English from the University of New Brunswick. In 2023, she was the winner of the RBC PEN Canada New Voices Award and in 2022, she was shortlisted for the RBC Writers' Trust Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. She now lives and writes in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, NS) in Mi'kma'ki.

"In Familial Hungers, Christine Wu ushers her readers into a world where time expands like cooked grains of rice, love is a bowl of cut fruit, and the dead still eat. Emotionally grounded and precise, Wu's poetry captures the elusive quality of the immigrant home - a place where tongues stutter and tastebuds recall - and shows us just how desire can linger in a full stomach. Familial Hungers is a full-bodied and deeply satisfying debut."
- Gillian Sze, author of Quiet Night Think

"Reading Christine Wu's Familial Hungers- Jane Wong, author of How to Not Be Afraid of Everything