Human Tissue: A primer of Not Knowing - Softcover

Chan, Weyman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0889229813 ISBN 13: 9780889229815

Publisher: Talonbooks, 2016

Synopsis

Weyman Chan’s fifth collection takes poetry to the laboratory, splicing a layered, tactile network that is Human Tissue.

Short lyric poems navigate personal experience and memory, then weave into serial poems such as “Parables for Frankenstein,” diving into the material conditions of hybridity to construct the symbiotic self of a prototype misfit. “Panic Room,” another serial poem probes the loner whose isolation at a house party takes a sinister turn, and “Unboxing the Clone” explores the causality of creation, where “trace beings” are felt in flesh and voiced in colloquial speech.

Human Tissue creates a language that is intimate while acknowledging relations to the social environment. Accompanied by the tones of an erhu, archaic Anglo-Saxon language jostles with Chinese, and self-censure meets Faust and Judith Butler to ask the vital questions of origin. Chan shows us how we come to settle with histories of uncertain origin, the presence of science and technology in the mediated body, and how we forge “not-knowing” as a vibrant way of being.

About this title

About the Author

Recipient of the 2021 Writer’s Trust Latner-Griffin Poetry Prize, Weyman Chan lives and works in Mohkinstsis (Calgary) on Treaty 7 Territory. His second book, Noise From the Laundry, was a finalist for the 2008 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Chan is a member of the filling Station magazine poetry collective. He is also working on a book of hybrid poetic fiction, Chronicle of a Sleep Tower. Weyman Chan’s notable past works include Human Tissue: a primer for Not Knowing (Talonbooks, 2016), which traces the making of monsters – real and metaphysical – when faced with unreliable creation narratives; and Witness Back at Me: mismothering and transmigration (Talonbooks, 2022), an intersectional biography of the author’s spiritual partnership with the late poet Sharron Proulx-Turner.

Edition details

• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0889229813
• ISBN 13: 9780889229815
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160