Meditating on exile, loss, diaspora, authoritarian law, and altered ecologies, Joanne Leow's debut collection spans from the would-be Eden of hyper-planned and surveilled Singapore to an uneasy settling in the Canadian Prairies, seeking answers to the question of what is lost in intensive urban development and the journey across continents. Reflecting on relationships between lovers, parents and children, state and citizen, land and body, seas move away asks what we owe each other across borders and what endures in times of great flux and irreversible ecological change.

Joanne Leow is an Assistant Professor at the University of Saskatchewan. Her essays, fiction, and poetry have been published in Brick, Catapult, Evergreen Review, The Goose, Isle, The Kindling, The Town Crier, QLRS, and Ricepaper Magazine. She grew up in Singapore and currently lives on Treaty 6 Territory (Saskatoon, SK).

Joanne Leow's profile page

Collisions, erosions and fractures occur in both external and internal landscapes in Joanne Leow's seas move away. Lyrical and intimate when addressing lovers and family, Leow's voice shifts into an incisive investigation of colonial legacies, interrogating and unsettling what is assumed as necessary or wise. Travelling between tropical tidal longings, and the stultifying cold of Saskatchewan winters, the poems in seas move away embody a palette of rich hues and nuanced textures.

-Lydia Kwa, author of Oracle Bone

This is an oceanic collection. Leow's lyrics, like sea currents, carve out deep recesses into the mind. Her courageous interrogations of power are scalpel-like, delicately exposing the "what histories are interred" in island, cities, and prairie. Her work pounds away at the façade of Canadian tolerance and diversity. It plunges the depths of nostalgia, diving through the layers of heartache with "feet that touch this seabed/ that swim in this tidal river/ that channel, my body/ those minerals, my blood." The poems drift backwards towards a vanished placed of origins, revealing ancestral knowledge like nacreous shards. Leow's poetic palate is a little sweet, a little savory. It's funky with the fermentation of colonial rule, and bitter as a medicinal tonic. Don't just stand at the edge of this multiplicity-swim in with your strongest strokes.

--Phoebe Wang