seas move away
(Turnstone Press, 2022)
Meditating on exile, loss, diaspora, authoritarian law, and altered ecologies, Joanne Leow’s debut collection spans from the would-be Eden of hyper-planned and surveilled Singapore to an uneasy settling in the Canadian Prairies, seeking answers to the question of what is lost in intensive urban development and the journey across continents. Reflecting on relationships between lovers, parents and children, state and citizen, land and body, seas move away asks what we owe each other across borders and what endures in times of great flux and irreversible ecological change.
Praise
In Seas Move Away, Joanne Leow guides us through the tumultuous present of migrant life, readying us with the necessary allegories to weather the coming storms. Leow gifts us with new maritime languages for diaspora, a counterpoetics for geopolitical and imperial violence, a sedimentary song for life anew.
—Adrian De Leon, barangay: an offshore poem
Collisions, erosions and fractures occur in both external and internal landscapes in Joanne Leow’s Seas Move Away. Lyrical and intimate when addressing lovers and family, Leow’s voice shifts into an incisive investigation of colonial legacies, interrogating and unsettling what is assumed as necessary or wise. Travelling between tropical tidal longings, and the stultifying cold of Saskatchewan winters, the poems in Seas Move Away embody a palette of rich hues and nuanced textures.
—Lydia Kwa, Oracle Bone
This is an oceanic collection. Leow’s lyrics, like sea currents, carve out deep recesses into the mind. Her courageous interrogations of power are scalpel-like, delicately exposing the “what histories are interred” in island, cities, and prairie. Her work pounds away at the façade of Canadian tolerance and diversity. It’s funky with the fermentation of colonial rule, and bitter as a medicinal tonic. Don’t just stand at the edge of this multiplicity—swim in with your strongest strokes.
—Phoebe Wang, Waking Occupations
Reviews and Interviews
River Volta interview by Dawn Muenchrath, River Volta Review of Books
“I find that protest poetry or dissident poetry is very hard to write. I spent a long time working as a journalist in Singapore, and when you’re a journalist in Singapore, you’re really a state mouthpiece, and there’s no room to question what’s being said. I was very fascinated with this language [in the statutes] that could be instrumentalized to produce a particular kind of culture and obedience from the population. I was fascinated by the laws themselves because they try to contain everything, to account for every possibility of what could happen in this land. I think that kind of totality needs to be challenged through the language.”
Traversing a Maritime Landscape A Singaporean in exile in Joanne Leow's poetry by Phinder Dulai, Rungh Magazine
“Leow’s mastery of linguistic disruption offers the reader a frame to engage and interrogate land ownership within the colonial and post-colonial moment, and she does this with a muscular use of vibrant words.”
“To Live Is to Lose Everything” by Genevieve Hartman, Suspect Journal
“This book is in many ways a catalogue of losses, written “for those who move away,” as the book dedication has it. Preserved here are the varied challenges of migration, times with loved ones, feelings of rage and loneliness that readers are invited into. Leow tackles these harsh truths of life with frankness and acceptance. Her lines and images waste no space, creating a book that is gorgeously stark and achingly sad. The sea flows and crashes throughout the collection, always drawing the speaker back towards salt and silt and home, until we too are pulled out by the tide and knocked over, “breathless in the / foam.”"
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Readings
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Joanne Leow Book Launch with Tenille K. Campbell
Recorded at McNally Robinson, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
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Planet Earth Poetry reading
Russell Books, Victoria, BC
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"June from a Year in Saskatchewan" | Poets Corner Reading Series