Slant

Description:

University of Toronto Quarterly (Volume 72 Number 1, Winter 2002/3) announced Slant as such:

Nightwood Editions offers four new collections: Billie Livingston's The Chick at the Back of the Church, Andy Quan's Slant, Jay Ruzesky's Blue Himalayan Poppies, and Norm Sacuta's Garments of the Known... Andy Quan is also a writer of fiction, as well as a singer and songwriter, and Slant is his first book of poems. A third-generation Chinese Canadian, Slant explores the experience of the Chinese diaspora. The poetry journeys through a range of places and cultures, always welcoming 'ceremony, extinction, discovery, new life' ('Flight Ice Blood Metal').

Back Cover Blurbs:

- Wayson Choy

"Andy Quan plumbs the delicate inevitability of connection between child and parent, siblings and extended family, between men as lovers and as friends, between insiders and outsiders, across cultures, continents and generations. And whether these connections are made by air, over coffee, or on the dance floor, Quan tunes them in language that is empathic and direct. The last word of one of this first book's finest poems most aptly describes its import: Slant launches the career of a poet whose trajectory is assured 'glitter.'"

- John Barton

Reviews:

(At the time that this review appeared, I was indignant: The "one exception" to the weaker poems is the whole last third of the book. How can a third of a book be an exception? More annoying was the analysis of identity politics. What counts as "substance" when talking of a life experience? And how could someone, whether gay or Asian or neither of those, evaluate what constitutes an intrinsic part of belonging to that particular identity? My brother pointed out that the Jewish identity is always political and perhaps the reviewer looked at my book through this lens. But I disliked the imposition of another cultural political identity on my own. To require someone, because they are identified in a particular way, to be political is an odd form of tokenism, and reduces that person to only one part of their identity is a way that is unconsciously racist or homophobic. You're Chinese so your poem about your Chinese grandmother must examine the Asian cultural experience. Your poem about your ex-lover is inherently political because you are gay. I railed, "How about being gay and Asian, without apology and without having to explain myself? I'd rather report my particular journey and a larger human one than somehow being required to S-P-E-L-L things out." Years later, I look back, and while I sympathize with my younger self - who made some not bad points - at the same time, I can see that the poems in the last third of the book were richer and more complex. Ah, touchy authors...)

The title of this debut poetry collection is an evocative pun on author Andy Quan's varied perspectives - that of an Asian-Canadian whose eyes are "slanted"; of a gay man whose sensual interest is "bent" or slanted away from the norm; and most importantly, of the slant view that the combination of these identities affords its author.

Other poets have made vivid use of minority experience as a way to analyze the world and their own place in it - Li-Young Lee comes to mind, as do Mark Doty and Dionne Brand. But all too frequently minority writers rely too heavily on the fact of their marginality rather than how that marginality sheds light on the world. Identity politics without the politics is really only narcissism disguised as soul-searching.

The problem with Slant is that, apart from a few complaints about customs officials and other brutes, little of substance is said about either the gay experience or the experience of being Asian in North America. Contrary to what Quan may believe, men dancing together are not inherently interesting, and his lyricism rarely transforms this by-now-familiar subject matter into the truly evocative. Quan has a responsibility to make his images and scenes more than reportage, but his poems rarely fulfill this mandate.

One exception is in the travel/love poems that appear in the final two sections. Here, Quan finds a lyric impulse that transcends the journal-entry style that hinders some of the other poems. The combination of subjects - lost love, unfamiliar landscapes, the feeling of foreignness - brings out the best in Quan, as in "Last Europe", which closes with "All these cities burnt into my eyes/like a chance eclipse, I feel your hand/touch my face, the whorl of your/fingerprints, my breath becoming short."

- Adam Sol, a Toronto poet and reviewer.

Poems:

Go back to Books & Writing

Go back to Andy Quan's homepage