Tumour

In Tumour, her latest collection of poems, Evelyn Lau writes on the edge between her present daily life, filled with its delicious and disturbing ironies, and her remembrance of a past both celebrated and blemished by misunderstanding and cultural collisions.

There is boldness in these poems as Lau confronts the inevitable changes that accompany a renewed reverence for and understanding of her own mortality. The title poem, written for a dying aunt, is exquisite, for its tenderness, dignity and sense of vulnerability. In a language rich, textured, and often subversive, but never sentimental, Lau has created poems of astonishing diversity and of great transient beauty.