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Posted: Tuesday March 23, 2010

Weyman Chan

Weyman Chan was born in Calgary, Alberta, in 1963, to immigrant parents from China. Chan wrote his first poem when he was thirteen years old. He 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 Award for his first book of poetry, Before a Blue Sky Moon. His second book, Noise From the Laundry, was a finalist for the 2008 Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the 2009 Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry.

April 2011 : Two Poetry Titles Shortlisted for W.O. Mitchell Book Prize!

September 2010 : How to Maverick

May 2010 : Video Clips From Talon’s 2010 Cross-Canada Poetry Tour: Vancouver

May 2010 : Talon Spring Launch at the Edmonton Poetry Festival

May 2010 : Talonbooks Spring Poetry Launch in Calgary

May 2010 : Talon Spring Poetry Night in Vancouver

BOOK AWARDS

Noise from the Laundry

Finalist for the 2009 Acorn Plantos Award for People’s Poetry

Finalist for the 2008 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry

BOOK AWARDS

hypoderm: notes to myself

W.O. Mitchell Literary Prize Finalist, 2010

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QUOTES OF NOTE

Chinese Blue

“Interwoven like richly suggestive translucent overlays of nerves, muscles, and bones, Chinese Blue illuminates the forces of fathering, masculinity, Chinese heritage, and global commerce scripting a body struggling to resist and redefine its source codes. The text hovers between the seen and the imagined, interrogating both, as it runs a tight line from the jazz of a blue toy piano to the blues of life in oil-greedy Alberta to a Guangdong blue-jeans factory to Dad’s blue cocoon. This poetry vividly sounds the cross-currencies and necessary entanglements of the lyric in times of famine, polar meltdown, carbon credits and massive production of media trivia.”
—Meredith Quartermain

“There are many things in the world to love. Weyman Chan’s poetry is one. Chinese Blue is a virtuoso performance by a poet who looks deep inside himself, others, and the distant rumblings of the world. He pronounces disquiet over their wordings—Lady Gaga, Arab Spring, G.I. Joe, Kurt Cobain, Two Small Men With Big Hearts and all the other brandings we are forced to carry in our hearts. Chan paints with the eyes of classical Chinese painter, whose brush strokes carry many meanings.”
—George Melnyk

“These poems are marvels of the gone but ever-sighted, every moment in/out simultaneous. Read Chinese Blue in your hover-alls. Peel the world true-gappy.”
—Gerald Hill

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QUOTES OF NOTE

Noise from the Laundry

“The deepest blues on prairie snow are Weyman Chan’s inks, his pen as precise and as elusive as the silken threads of ’a tiny spider,’ who ’ lifts its abdomen / positions its centre / and sails off into the thin parachute / of the air we call a nation.’”
—Sharron Proulx-Turner

“What’s magnificent here is that Weyman Chan has not shied from his history. This book carries at its heart the China he is a generation removed from. True agents of insurrection, these poems mix their languages, making the ordinary world mysterious: ’Calm,’ he writes, ’is what all desire wants.’ In the end, every insurrection must be for something, too. For me, Weyman offers that point in Uncle Dong Gei, 104 years old ’who just keeps going.’ It’s his face that gives the image not just of this book and its writer, but of the relationship between poetry and its poets.”
—Richard Harrison

“Language here has no home but a traveller’s duffel, shifting to accommodate, offering love where all logic suggests there should be none.”
—Ashok Mathur

”The condition of ’noise’ in these poems can be heard in the fine tuning of deep need. The ’laundry’ is, of course, that image-laden triangle of diasporic memory, history, and desire. Weyman Chan scans the range of frequencies that cling to skin, name, family, and place in a poetry of openness and attention grounded ’always,’ as he says, in the ’inkline / unwinding under hell’ and ’poured like water / on my need to know.’ Turn on the poetry radio in this book and tune into its ’scurfing rumour’!
—Fred Wah

“Chan’s writing is technically superb … His nuances echo Alice Munro: seemingly straight-faced beginnings that subtly change into something entirely (or so it seems) unrelated, endings that sneakily jilt your entire understanding of the piece.” —Alberta Views “ Noise from the Laundry broaches its subject matter in an original and frank manner with a lush, honest, and provocative narrative voice.” —Matrix

“The question of how to act with integrity underlies many of his poems, which are less like linear narratives than intricate reveries richly threaded with reminiscences, dreams, musings on his cultural heritage … Chan’s poems are … as delicate and resonant as [a] paper crane.”
—CBC

“Chan is as fragile as a dandelion seed ball and as strong as granite. He knows that we possess little besides the air in our lungs and the blood in our veins, and we must take tender care of those around us.”
—Arc Poetry