In these devastating lyric poems Jen Sookfong Lee unfolds the experience of her narrator, following her through frost-chilled nights and salt-scented days, as she pulls at the knot of accumulated expectations around her trying to create space to want and to be. The Shadow List is a book filled with desire, where we question the politics of who gets to choose and who doesn't and where the narrator creates hidden lists of what she really wants. With a novelist's way with character, Lee builds a deep connection with the narrator of the poems, yet each individual poem creates a vivid snapshot of moments many will recognize. The slick of black ice, the killing light of day, the cheap, plastic diamonds – they are all pieces of a life we gather and put in our pockets to remember with.

Jen Sookfong Lee was born and raised on Vancouver's East Side, and she now lives with her son in North Burnaby. Her books include The Conjoined, nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award and a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize; The Better Mother, a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award; The End of East; Gentlemen of the Shade; Chinese New Year and The Animals of Chinese New Year. Jen was a columnist for CBC Radio One's The Next Chapter for many years. She teaches at The Writer's Studio Online with Simon Fraser University, edits fiction for Wolsak & Wynn and co-hosts the literary podcast Can't Lit.

Jen Sookfong Lee's profile page

"Lee's poetry is not pretty; it's mascara-smudged and red-eyed, anxious and prickly. But it is also vividly, gorgeously alive."

"The poems in The Shadow List are tightly concentrated narratives that dissect their subjects with an almost surgical precision."

"Lee [has] harnessed recognizable conceits of dreaming to create poetic works that expand [her] readers' waking consciousnesses past everyday barriers of self, memory and convention."

Event: Poetry and Prose

“The Shadow List is a compulsively readable collection of poems touching on everything from moth infestations to former lovers, and from text etiquette to a common lie told by writers . . . There’s an urgency to this text. It’s direct, detailed, and courageous. And it delivers rich, contemporary tales through vignettes in the narrator’s life.”

The Georgia Straight