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I’ve lived in this place we call Canada for the past 13 years. Growing up in Singapore, I don’t think I was prepared for the vastness and heterogeneity of this country. Living in Saskatoon for the past six or so years, I’ve learned a lot about distance and connection, violent histories and complicated truths. This list includes some of the poetry books that have helped me begin to understand what it means to call this place, tentatively, home. Many of them were echoing in my brain when I wrote and revised my debut collection of poems, Seas Move Away. These poems have helped me grapple with ideas of diaspora, belonging, and what it means to be an (un)settler of colour. They have given me insights to the layered ecologies and stories in the land and water. They have sparked difficult questions and discussions in my classrooms. This list goes to eleven because I couldn’t leave anyone out since these complex issues deserve to, just a little, exceed the rules and boundaries we set for ourselves.

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the place of scraps, by Jordan Abel

I am in awe by how Abel explodes the colonial archive and text in these found and erasure poems. Growing up in a postcolony, I remember being swept away and convinced by the authority of white scholars, and fascinated by their view of my own homeland. Abel’s excavations of the canonical anthropology text about the Nisga’a Nation by Marius Barbeau are to me one of the most effective confrontations with the colonial voice. His stunning use of visuals, art, and poetry challenge what it means to make meaning and knowledge under colonial occupation.

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Land to Light On, Dionne Brand

I love all of Brand’s poetry but this was my first experience with her work—as a graduate student in Toronto. Even beyond the sheer brilliance of her craft and language, what really moves me about this collection is how Brand manages to balance collective pain and memory with the intimate and the visceral. Her poems interrogate what it means to move between countries, to live amidst the ongoing legacy of violence, and to belong. The long poem “Land to Light On” contains a line that always punches me in the gut: “everywhere you walk on the earth there’s harm, everywhere resounds.”

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Performance Bond, by Wayde Compton 

Compton’s experimental, multi-faceted poetry in Performance Bond is both rich and playful in its use of language. The rhythm and the collage of genres in the collection really enable a profound exploration of Black culture in British Columbia, and its connections to ongoing waves of immigration and refugees. I love how his poems pull in so many cultural, sonic, and political references—it can be a dizzying experience reading this work but that is only because his words come so close to reflecting the confounding reality in which we find ourselves.

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barangay, by Adrian De Leon

barangay takes its title from the name of a pre-colonial Philippine outrigger book. Accordingly, De Leon’s collection takes us on a series of voyages with the Filipino diaspora writ large across multiple continents and bodies of water. I love how it is an archipelagic collection, its islands encompassing landlocked cities, places in North America, Asia, and beyond. And I am always bowled over by the kinetic energy of De Leon’s verse. His work has radically opened up how to think about the intersections of diaspora and Indigeneity.

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Settler Education, by Laurie D. Graham

I find Graham’s work extremely sobering and crucial in understanding the history of the Plains Cree uprising at Frog Lake in the prairies and its aftermath. It really feels that, as a white settler poet, Graham has taken such pains to reckon with what it means to truly understand this history and how it implicates all of us who have chosen to call Canada home. Her poem, “The Train Back,” written literally as a document of her journey back to Ontario is an astonishing inventory of the contradictions and beauty of this land.

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Rebuild, by Sachiko Murakami

Murakami’s Rebuild really struck me because of its excoriating critique of Vancouver’s condo culture and urban development which is predicated on the dispossession of multiple communities. Its astute understanding of land and its transnational connections really spoke to my feelings about Singapore’s own trajectory. But beyond its themes, Murakami’s facility with the poetic lines and breaks really speaks to the rebuilding and renovating of Vancouver’s cityscapes.

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From the Poplars, by Cecily Nicholson

Like Murakami, Nicholson is writing from British Columbia but more specifically about Poplar Island in the northern arm of the Fraser River. She explains from the beginning that her poetic work in this space is “a minor purchase of property” as she digs deep into historical documents that attempt to define and seize this space. Nicholson, like Abel, delves deep into settler colonial language, its false legalities that define possession. She asks what property and settlement mean on unceded lands.

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Singing Home the Bones, by Gregory Scofield

This is a book about loss and grief that is intimately tied to land and memory. Scofield’s tender and heartfelt elegies to his Métis family are steeped in specific cultural knowledge and yet immediately and deeply moving to anyone who has ever lost a loved one. My favourite poem from this collection is “Conversation with the Poet who didn’t know my aunty”—it’s a powerful and unflinching condemnation of racism and misogyny.

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found, by Souvankham Thammavongsa

At first glance, Thammavongsa’s book seems slight and brief. But she is so masterful at using the empty spaces of the page to convey so much emotion and thought. The work is based on a scrapbook that her father kept in a Lao refugee camp in Thailand; she writes, “He threw it out and when he did, I took it and found this.” Found examines what we can and cannot know about familial and refugee histories. The gaps and absences in the text signify so much in and of themselves—of things too manifold or terrible to record, of silences that will never be explained. Thammavongsa’s short, epigram-like poems take on seemingly stereotypical themes like “light, “the sun,” “the heart,” and so forth, and peel away all layers of cliché to create new truths.

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Admission Requirements, by Phoebe Wang

Wang’s debut collection twines family life and natural imagery in the context of an often treacherous settler colonial Canadian landscape. Her poetry speaks to me because it is so conscious of how we are all called upon to “perform” a certain kind of identity in this country. But this performance is complicated by the realities of diaspora, of colonial history, and contemporary capitalist life. These poems are so self-aware and yet not self-satisfied, still searching and still plumbing the depths of what it means to be here in this time.

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forage, by Rita Wong

Wong’s second collection of poetry has a distinctive cover photograph of an apocalyptic heap of electronic waste in China. Her wide-ranging, border-crossing ecological poems indict our collective ignorance of the terrible effects mass consumption and late capitalism have outsourced the worst of the collateral pollution to other countries, especially those in Asia. This is also a book that dwells on the porosity of the body. Her work reminds us of our intractable relationship with an increasingly degraded air, water, and land.

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Learn more about seas move away:

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.