Jill Chan’s These Hands Are Not Ours, her third book of poetry, explores the deep and sometimes uncanny relationships between our human experiences and our wider, more tenuous though, at times, no less ambiguous experiences of the divine. These poems are written in an almost subliminal language filled with beautiful tension and silent immensity.
Welcome to the new address of my official website, JillChan.net, where I post news about books, publications, appearances; new poem drafts, works in progress, essays, thoughts about poetry and poetics; and other updates as they come.
My new book, These Hands Are Not Ours, has been awarded the 2009 Earl of Seacliff Poetry Prize. Thanks to Michael O’ Leary. The book is available now from my publisher, Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop.
Please mention that you learned about These Hands Are Not Ours from the author when you order a copy via the link below:
http://www.earlofseacliff.co.nz/TheseHands.htm
Or if you want to order via online bookstore, just click below:
Or you could order online from Academy Books, or South Pacific Books.
Listen to readings from the book at http://audio.jillchan.net
I make new posts here or tweets on twitter.com (displayed in the left sidebar) here every day. The posts start below the five poem drafts in this message. Some posts, especially new poem drafts, may be password protected. I usually take poem drafts down when I have another I want to post. The poems and prose must not be copied, reproduced, saved, reprinted, or reposted in any medium, electronic or otherwise, because they are copyrighted material.
Hope you visit from time to time.
Thank you very much.
Warmly yours,
Jill
On Metaphor
Now that I am ready to write about the world,
the metaphors hinder like love,
like the love of body.
Now that we are ready to describe the world,
who will believe anything here?
The world, not as world, but as the body of the world.
Death is reduced to security for the ones around the dead.
Life is a living.
Truth doesn’t appear but figures itself,
now countable, now spent like love is undertaken.
A goal like everything else.
To get to passion.
To kick compassion into a bruise.
And poetry is useful
and too small like the world
and its cover.
(published in DenverSyntax)
Luc Simonic, the editor, was kind enough to email me regarding submitting to them.
The Making of Myths and Legends
If anything, we could thank you
for not being relative.
You could make any truth
see through the dark of you.
Stories built of nothing grand,
just daily misgivings—
not craft, not art—
mislaid and taken up
like the memories you couldn’t wait
to make of us—
the accumulation of everything alterable—
the photographs we already are
in your frozen mind
not cold from weather
but habit.
Testament
When we first arrived here,
you kept dropping hints
about wills and testaments.
Today, another part of you,
someone else similar,
wanted to take away
the air out of this room,
to suffocate the will and the body
as if you own the air
the way you own the water.
Some things cannot be said.
And this is language
but not a metaphor at all.
Just To Make Sure
It is funny now
that we look back
at how foolish we’ve been,
to be better than we are capable of becoming.
Like the people we believed
but afterwards reviled for letting ourselves believe them.
The worst is when we could never choose to love.
For example, a mother or a father who isn’t your mother or father at all.
We who have been thanking them all our lives
now thank them for being the people they really are–
human like we are,
only less to themselves as we all are to the others who live in us,
those beautiful strangers
we never get to be
now laughing along with us.
Thanksgiving
Sometimes we thank You
for no reason at all.
A life is a reason to be thankful—
how they sometimes take for granted
the things You’ve given us.
We are all that.
We are Your making.
Some learn this too late.
They continue to want
the people they love
to live and die for them,
forgetting they themselves
may never be able to live again
though they breathe.
Because in this other dying,
they know to breathe,
having taken so much that is Yours
that is never theirs.
All poems, and other written material where noted, on this website and blog Copyright © Jill Chan. All Rights Reserved. For your private and personal reading only. Copying, reproducing, saving, reprinting, or reposting in any medium, electronic or otherwise, is strictly prohibited.
Filed under: announcement, award, books, poem draft, reading, update | Comments Off
