Paring by Travis Chi Wing Lau
$14.99
“How this collection made me feel: like I’m standing on the mountains, on an accessible hiking trail. That I again work with my hands. That memory is preservable. A kind lover in another city cooks for me. Summer evening, screened-in porch, a crush. Intangible pull between city and the rural, tension that persists even after we’ve found home somewhere unexpected. Fear and flowering of an unruly body. Loss unending, self-care as justice. Travis Chi Wing Lau is expanding disability poetics, drawing on the rich blood between chronic pain and the natural world, evoking Eli Clare’s queer erotics of plants and slowness. Poems that love both the domestic and the wild.”
–Jesse Rice-Evans
“How much does it take for two broken men to walk upright?” asks Travis Chi Wing Lau in one poem of this stunning collection. Its title, Paring, makes me think of pairing—and this is the realm of these poems: at once a sharp peeling back and a tender commingling. Always, a revelation. Lau is a poet who sings of how “[l]iving is about waxing / before the waning comes.” His song inhabits queerness and disability with surprising syntax, deeply memorable imagery, and a commitment to truth-telling, however cutting that truth turns out to be. There are “fields of pain” and there are also “other worlds budding quietly.” Instead of the world as it is, Lau insists on a different nature, a queer generative urge that is queerest generosity: “a natural return / to deviant / spontaneity.”
–Chen Chen
“Travis Chi Wing Lau’s Paring is a remarkable catalogue of the ways a body both seeks and refuses stasis. It indexes the unlikely intimacies in how pain makes a home in the flesh, the almost imperceptible ways we come to love someone, and the miraculous manner in which elements yield “organic forms / by riveting / atom to atom, / body to body.” It charts, too, the distances that pain creates, the ways even a body riveted in shape shifts ceaselessly. This collection is a record of something ongoing despite itself: the trouble and the grace of that. “I wish it were otherwise,” the speaker tells us, and also “the trick of survival is stubbornness.” There is a world here that is “one joy placed / beside another”: intentionally, at a cost, and with great skill, inventiveness, and care. Encountering it is a gift”.
–Molly McCully Brown
Description
Paring
by Travis Chi Wing Lau
$14.99, paper
978-1-64662-374-7
2020
Paring is a poetic meditation on the processes of change. The title refers to the act of “paring”—a peeling away of layers and parts toward the formation of a self. To that end, my collection asks what it means to do this work of paring over time: What gets left behind or violently removed in the pursuit of growth, particularly as a queer, disabled person of color whose histories and experiences are so often marked on the skin? How do we reconcile the fact that what we pare away may have once enveloped us, protected us but no longer? “Paring” also suggests the fruit: this book sits with what has already flowered and what has not yet come to fruition, all of which will come to rot after flourishing.
Travis Chi Wing Lau is Assistant Professor of Eighteenth-Century and Romantic British Literature at Kenyon College. His poetry has appeared in Barren Magazine, Wordgathering, Glass, Foglifter, Rogue Agent, and in a chapbook, The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press, 2019). [travisclau.com]
L. E. Hicks –
I found a kindred spirit in Travis’s work. I am a bisexual trans woman, I am bipolar and I am a buddhist.
Identity aside, the reason i mention this is there are none too many I can entirely relate to with all these intersections. Travis, is the furthest that has come and I am eternally grateful.
This book drifts the ebb and flow of empathy and intersection throughout human life. It doesn’t cut deep but rather swims through the cracks of a person’s walls and identity.From whatever walk of life, you may learn and relate to this. World class work.
Diane R. Wiener –
Review in Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature
https://wordgathering.com/vol15/issue1/reviews/lau/