going home

"As a sequence, going home unfolds with a mixture of astonishing technical assurance and intense personal and physical immediacy. We are reminded that the tongue tastes as well as speaks, and that the complex experience of a many-layered cultural history is built into the whole life of the body. These are poems in which the meaningfulness of the convergence of body and soul is wonderfully captured; a rare, vivid, sensitive, precise voice."
—Rowan Williams, Former Archbishop of Canterbury, Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, theologian, and poet

"Afternoons become beautiful when you sit with Jonathan Chan’s going home. The poems glisten with an impeccable, pearlescent quality – a distinct purity of soul. This is confident lyric-making that builds on its own strengths, image upon image, line upon line, poem upon poem. This is a voice of poised restraint, at once clear-headed and self-assured. What a rare joy to witness and draw in the quiet wisdom. It’s a collection I would keep on my bookshelf for life."
—Desmond FX Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, Poet and Founder, Squircle Line Press