A poetic travelogue, Gillian Sze’s Peeling Rambutan meditates upon the rifts between immigrant parents and their Canadian-born children and the struggle of overlapping values which sometimes arises when we view the complexity of our heritage through the lens of the present. Rooted in Sze’s first experience of Asia, these poems mingle the familiar spaces of her childhood home in Winnipeg with impressions of the distant villages of her parents’ origins. The result is a complex exploration of the relationship between identity, place, and history. Landscape and language prove unstable, inhabited by ghosts and other echoes of passing time which leave indelible impressions on the poet: A market in Hong Kong seems reminiscent of Montreal; the spirit of her great-grandmother shows up on a commercial street in China, then in Queen Elizabeth Park in Vancouver. The mundane–a bite of fruit, a boy selling raisins, the floured hands of a baker–takes on a contemplative cast. In such a world, a traveller is never wholly certain whether she is discovering an unexplored world or descending into memory, but Sze’s lyrically-driven poems navigate confidently, mapping new terrain while remaining sensitive to the claims of the past.

Shortlisted for the 2014 A.M. Klein Poetry Prize.

Gillian Sze is the author of multiple poetry collections, including Peeling Rambutan, Redrafting Winer and Panicle. Her work has been nominated for the QWF’s A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, and has received awards such as the University of Winnipeg Writers’ Circle Prize and the 3Macs carte blanche Prize. She studied creative writing and English literature at Concordia University and received a PhD in études anglaises from the Université de Montréal. Originally from Winnipeg, she now resides in Montreal, where she teaches creative writing. The Night Is Deep and Wide is her first board book and was inspired by her son who was a challenging sleeper as a baby.

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