Awards

• Short-listed for Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry 2022 (United States)

Overview

The poems in The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak explore the many identities, both visible and invisible, that a body contains. With influences from pop culture, the Bible, tech, and Hong-Kongese history, these pieces reflect and reveal how the stories of immigrants in Canada hold both universal truths and singular distinctions. From boybands that show the way to become ""the kind of girl a girl could love"" to ""rich flavours that are just a few generations of poverty away,"" they invite the reader to meditate on spirituality, food, and the shapes love takes.

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9781771835879

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Reviews

Lau's work lurches off the page and seizes your hand like an old friend that cannot wait to catch up with you; you learn of the speaker's romantic escapades, their family, their hurts old and new. Reading this collection makes you feel reached out to, and that is no small feat in a time everything and everyone can seem very, very far away. -- Canthius Magazine Ripe with intention and embroidered with the tiny pinpricks of pain, her language, the one she discovers alone in the dark, where we have all been left for so long, is naked, free of ballast as a sinking ship that does not sink but sails into the next sunrise, truth. -- The Ormsby Review Lau plays expertly in the messy gray between forms and realities, between languages and cultures. Through these juxtapositions we see what it's like to live intersectionality: the beauty and the struggles. It is in this space between the black and white that the collection makes its home. -- PRISM International

Author Information

Grace is a Hong-Kong-born, Chinese Canadian writer raised in Vancouver and currently living in Toronto. She enjoys Harry Styles' fashion choices, swaying to music, and sushi. Find her on social media @thrillandgrace.

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