Poetry that navigates the science of cold waterways to consider the warmth of the poet’s Chinese-Mauritian family ties
Fire Cider Rain is about the limits to which shared cultural and geographic histories can hold a family together. It follows the lives of three Chinese-Mauritian women on the course of dispersing, settling, and rooting over northern landscapes, and the brittle family bonds that tie them to one another and to their home country. Told from the perspective of the youngest of the three women, Fire Cider Rain follows the events leading up to and following the death of her grandmother, an ex-lighthouse keeper and matriarch whose fractured relationship with her own daughter haunts the narrator’s life in soft, painful aftershocks. As she navigates the cold cities and waterways of Southern Ontario, our narrator struggles with conflicting desires to run toward and flee from her island identity, which grows ever distant, ever more difficult to find her way back to.
At its core, Fire Cider Rain is a book about parent-child relationships as vessels for cultural identity, and the ways in which expressions of love and non-love within those relationships can rupture sense of place, self, and at times, a collective diaspora. Throughout the book, Ng Cheng Hin explores the geopolitics of island nations, the dilution of family histories over time, and the experience of water as a medium for the cyclical movement of island bodies, stories, and cultures. The Mauritian landscape and waterways of southern Ontario recur through the book as convergence points for its many themes.
"In this stunning debut, Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin weaves wondrous verse across geological spaces that extend from Mauritius to Canada. In this poetry, the Indian Ocean converses with northern landscapes to give voice to the (un)settling of diasporic women in search of rootedness. Water becomes a medium, a metaphor, a rhythm, a motif, and a metamorphosing figure through which memory, loss and mourning become bodies. Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin's sweeping poetry is infused with dexterous and lavish verse that makes the reader want to live within the nuances of each line. Fire Cider Rain is a dazzling debut!" – Kama La Mackarel, author of ZOM-FAM
“Mauritian waters of memory migrate through ‘imperial decay’ and ‘calcic dust’ to the cold northern continent where Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin’s lustrous poetic telemetry manifests a lexical biogeography of uprootedness—her lyrical ‘I’ the connecting thread between past and future, between mother and moth, grandmother and cyclone, selia lover and terra nullius. Fire Cider Rain erupts as ebb and swell, distilling belonging and meaning in postcolonial drift, filling absence with terraqueous inquiry and salvaged wake.” – Jeffrey Yang, author of Line and Light
"In reading Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin’s poetry, I became immersed within a deep sense memory of why I came to love poetry in the first place. Her attunement to language and cadence vibrates, or as she writes 'love – or recognition, catches in my throat and stings.' Hers is a voice that can make nerve endings sing and one that speaks with such artful earnestness to the difficulties there are in a personal history. Ng Cheng Hin’s poetry is cousin to the spider's web, which belies a kind of vulnerability through its delicate beauty, yet each of its strands contains an exceptional tensile strength." – Liz Howard, author of Letters in a Bruised Cosmos
Authors
- Pages
- 106
- Published in
- Canada
Table of Contents
- Cover 1
- Half Title Page 3
- Title Page 5
- Copyright Page 6
- Table of Contents 9
- Part I: Evaporate 11
- Coefficients of Friction 13
- Seamelt I 20
- Floodlines 22
- Trickle Down 23
- The Laws of Thermodynamics I 24
- Human Dissection Lab 26
- When Wàipó Died 27
- Selia 28
- Oil Spill I 29
- Seamelt II 31
- Part II: Condensate 33
- The Laws of Thermodynamics II 35
- The Turtle Behind the Cigarette Shop 37
- Interred 39
- Antipode 41
- Dictionaries in the Sand 43
- Dry Season 47
- The Laws of Thermodynamics III 48
- Hologram 51
- Lessons in Southern Tides 53
- Eulogy for Roadkill on a Yukon Solstice 57
- Thaw 60
- Year of the Lamb 62
- Funeral 66
- Part III: Precipitate 69
- The Lighthouse Keeper of Pointe Aux Sables 71
- Oil Spill II 74
- Recurring Seam 76
- Six Thunderstorms in Chinatown 77
- Circadian Rain 79
- Recipe for a Southern Cyclone 80
- Trimesters 82
- Wet Season 85
- Cicadas 86
- When She Stopped Me at the Gas Station in Hautes-Plaines 87
- Room Service 89
- Part IV: Collect 91
- Māmā, Where Does Your Light Leak? 93
- Acknowledgements 104
- About the Author 105