Having left China for Canada with her parents as a child, Yuè Yuè yearns to discover who she is as she nears the end of her degree and starts a new relationship. In urgent poetic fragments, she seeks common ground with her Canadian-born younger sister and grieves the cousin she lost touch with back home. Meanwhile, her date ghosts her, and her mother’s illness advances like snow. On a walk in the woods, Yuè Yuè sees a little girl digging in the mud, but when she peeks behind the curtain of black hair, her own face stares back, haunting her.
In endless perfect loops of memory and dream, loss and return, Silver Repetition tenderly illuminates the fullness of identity despite fractures in language, culture, and relationships.
Having left China for Canada with her parents as a child, Yuè Yuè yearns to discover who she is as she nears the end of her degree and starts a new relationship. In urgent poetic fragments, she seeks common ground with her Canadian-born younger sister and grieves the cousin she lost touch with back home. Meanwhile, her date ghosts her, and her mother’s illness advances like snow. On a walk in the woods, Yuè Yuè sees a little girl digging in the mud, but when she peeks behind the curtain of black hair, her own face stares back, haunting her.
In endless perfect loops of memory and dream, loss and return, Silver Repetition tenderly illuminates the fullness of identity despite fractures in language, culture, and relationships.
| Published By | House of Anansi Press Inc — Feb 20, 2024 |
| Specifications | 264 pages | 5.25 in x 8 in |
| Keywords | asian canadian authors; lgbtq2a+; non-binary; immigrant stories; kim ji young; cho-nam joo; saha; toronto authors; canadian literature; diasporic chinese literature; experimental writing; queer studies; poetics; |
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Excerpt |
| Written By |
LILY WANG was born in Shanghai, China, and immigrated to Canada at the age of six. They have an MA in English and creative writing from the University of Toronto. They live in Toronto. |
| Written By |
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LILY WANG was born in Shanghai, China, and immigrated to Canada at the age of six. They have an MA in English and creative writing from the University of Toronto. They live in Toronto. |
Full of admirable risks in language and form.
” —KirkusLily Wang’s Silver Repetition illumines the forbidden shadows of memory and loss. Wang interrogates the many selves and the words which confront us: bú shì wǒ. Their language burns down a wick as it exposes how we become what we refuse to let go.
” —E. J. Koh, author of The Magical Language of OthersLike hyacinth bulbs, Lily Wang’s Silver Repetition is iridescently and culturally fierce. Acheful with familial bonds, Wang’s narration is hypnotic and rich and intimate and wild, with sharp, overgrown private silvery remembrance that shatters the elevated symbiosis between memoir and memory, mourning and materiality, ancestry and delivery. Highly attentive to details and inoculated with intermittent poetic splendours, it is a diurnal, highly imaginative work that sharpens all our senses and makes us appreciate each second of our life beyond and within the diaspora.
” —Vi Khi Nao, author of Swimming with Dead StarsThis is a book of tenderness—compassionate, sore, seeking. All is displacement and the complicated longing it ignites; and here too, the longing and acuity of youth, deeply felt, deeply seeing.
” —Anne Michaels, author of Fugitive PiecesFiercely poetic and luminous with surrealist imagery, Silver Repetition is a deeply moving and humane exploration of fractured self, deep longing, lost memories, diaspora, and aching family ties. Here is a gorgeous book that reads like a luxurious dreamscape from beginning to end. Wang is a thrilling and captivating new voice in contemporary fiction.
” —Lindsay Wong, author of The Woo-Woo and Tell Me Pleasant Things about ImmortalityGhostly, fishy, and deeply moving. With sensitivity and grace, Lily Wang captures all the fleeting and contradictory feelings that come from leaving one world behind and entering another. Family members are echo chambers, not empty but rather overflowing with the sounds and sensations of other moments, some mere seconds past, others distant and impossible.
” —Larissa Lai, author of The Lost Century