sikfan glaschu

Sean Wai Keung
Verve Poetry Press

In sikfan glaschu, Sean Wai Keung uses the thread of food to weave together a life in pandemic isolation, customer service degradation, familial separation, longing and discomfort, and an innate questioning of belonging through our conception of built homes, both as individuals choosing a city apart from the one in which we were born, or as migrant communities displaced through choice or circumstance. Layering languages, cultures, menus, online reviews, memories sparked by places and dishes, Wai Keung constructs a map of glaschu, building up the incredibly individualistic texture of a lived-in city while still containing allusions to shared experiences by all who may have traversed the same space. He looks at the multi-generational ways in which people are held to spaces even if those spaces are more or less accepting of the cross-cultural labour which enables their existence.

this place was built by migrants
therefore it is ours

Moving through the intangibly relational way we share food, as a foundationally vulnerable and intimate experiences between beings, whether of friendship, family, romance or other, as well as the after-affects of certain spaces where food has been shared and has become enshrined to the echoing memory of something lost, Wai Keung’s speaker shares memories of childhood congee and the feelings of unchosen isolation and separation of the pandemic.

the sound of helicopters above becomes overwhelmingly
present in the street as i walk down towards the park
on my allocated one-outside-walk-per-day

Wai Keung demonstrates how we show love and care through the making of, sharing of, or recommending of food even when those recommendations, seen through the juxtaposing private yet forcibly public space of the internet go starkly awry.

Wai Keung’s poetry is strongly curated, with an interactive momentum in the reading as you turn the book this way and that, to read poetry built side-ways, climbing up, incorporating layers of language and intricate descriptions of dishes that will make your mouth water. Through a meticulous interchangeability of first and second person which somehow never feels confusing or forced, Wai Keung’s talent as a poet shines through this collection. Leading the reader through an album of recollections, in the transient and migrating way human thought often moves. We are given a multi-layered view of selfhood while at the same time allowing our own simultaneous musings on our relationships with food, culture, isolation, love, family, the pandemic, friendship, childhood, KFC, and favourite meals.

—Meredith Grace Thompson