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Poems about the sense of belonging, about the tenuous ties we make across borders both international and internal.
In The Family China, her second book of poems, Ann Shin examines the decentering experiences of migration, loss and death, and the impulse to build anew. In five suites threaded through with footnote-like fragments that haunt and ambush the text like memories, the book accrues associations, building and transforming images from poem to poem, creating a layered and cohesive collection that asks daring questions about how we define ourselves.
These poems grapple rawly and musically with the profound messiness of human relations; their candour consoles and instructs. The quandaries in The Family China are deeply recognizable. Strung up between fragility and resilience, between naive hope and domestic disillusionment, between an untenable nostalgia for the pastoral and a deep unease with the global, the voice of these poems is nevertheless determined to find some scrap of a song we can sing in common.
"That Shin is also a filmmaker is evident in the book's cinematic quality--there's a strange, frantic unity in [her] vision."—Phoebe Wang
"[An] evocative, impressionistic collection...Shin is keenly aware of how geography defines and transforms us."—Leah McLaren
"Dense, but not difficult, Shin's poems deftly navigate the dark waters of history, a river you never step into twice."—Jonathan Ball
, The Globe and MailRaised on a farm in BC's Fraser Valley, Ann Shin now lives in Toronto with her husband and two daughters. An award-winning filmmaker, new media producer, and former radio producer, Ann recently directed and produced the documentary Defector: Escape from North Korea.