As a multilingual poet from Hong Kong, I have chosen to write in English, yet Chinese is always there in my work as its foil or fraternal twin, largely owing to the fact that I only speak in Cantonese or Mandarin Chinese with my parents, and my mother does not speak English. I love how Vahni Capildeo – another Carcanet and former New Poetries poet – depicts her relationship to language in Measures of Expatriation: ‘Language is my home. It is alive other than in speech. It is beyond a thing to be carried with me. It is ineluctable, variegated and muscular.’ As a queer poet, I have felt language’s unique capacity for carrying and transforming trauma. I have experienced how an attentiveness to form – be it a sonnet or pantoum, or simply a tercet or couplet – offers a powerful means to negotiate complex emotions that arise from our lived experiences as social, political and historical beings. I hold fast to the words of Adrienne Rich, who maintained that ‘lying is done with words, and also with silence’. The poems that have been selected for this anthology represent some of my attempts at speech, with the hopes of revealing and overcoming the long shadow of shame cast by internalised homophobia and racism, all the while responding to the lyric demands of poetry: the necessity of honouring each poem’s inner music and cadence.

I came to poetry at the age of twenty-one out of a desperate need for language, and found reassurance in the work of poets such as Mary Oliver, who offered my young, closeted self these generous, life-saving words in her poem Wild Geese: ‘You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves.’ I have since sought to write poems that reflect the struggles of queer youth, poems about how intergenerational trauma caused by historical events such as the Cultural Revolution can threaten to unravel the soundest of minds and the most loving of familial bonds. I wish to meditate on how we might hope to heal and care for ourselves as well as those we love in the most difficult and challenging of circumstances. Ultimately, these selected poems are expressions of desire for a more compassionate world in which we might learn, in the words of Claudia Rankine, ‘how to care for the injured body’ so our best selves can thrive and flourish.