Amy Ching-Yan Lam
Amy Ching-Yan Lam
2023 Governor General's Award for Poetry FinalistLonglisted 2024 Gerald Lampert Award"God is personal," the astrologer said. Terrifying and also personal, like a baby. Direct and humorous, Baby Book stacks story upon story to explore how beliefs are first formed. From a family vacation on a discount bus tour to a cosmogony based on cheese, these poems accumulate around principles of contingency and revelation. Amy Ching-Yan Lam describes the vivid tactility of growth and death-how everything is constantly, painfully remade-offering a vision against the stuck narratives of property and inheritance. Power is located in the senses, in wind: multiple and restless.