In Witness Back at Me, Weyman Chan continues to explore themes of dislocation and belonging by drawing on biography, myth, science, and the everyday. Chan’s poetry is suffused with a collage-like immersion of stream-of-conscious voices, approximating the kaleidoscopic effect of interior thought.

Witness Back at Me draws on the childhood loss of Chan’s mother to breast cancer, as a survival mechanism towards an aesthetics of accepted disembodiment, always haunted by a search for nurturing and surrender to some greater being. The poems in this book intertwine polyvocally, building into a liminal biographical metanarrative: the whole point of existence, the author believes, is to luxuriate in the greater being of not-knowing. To accept the historical underpinnings, the brokenness of the world, inside and outside the self, but be in constant communication of both worlds, towards understanding and healing, is the one true meaningful quest.

Weyman Chan
Born in Calgary, Alberta, Weyman Chan has published poems and short stories in a wide variety of literary journals and anthologies.

He won the 2002 National Magazine Awards silver prize for his poem “At work,” and the 2003 Alberta Book Awards for his first book of poetry, Before a Blue Sky Moon. His second book, Noise from the Laundry (Talonbooks), was nominated for the 2008 Governor General’s Award for Poetry.

A laboratory technician by trade, Chan distills a unique inner voice in the spiraling, non-sequential and non-temporal syntax of poetry.

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