Witness Back at Me (Paperback)

In Witness Back at Me, Weyman Chan continues to explore themes of dislocation and belonging by drawing on biography, myth, science, and the everyday. Chan’s poetry is suffused with a collage-like immersion of stream-of-conscious voices, approximating the kaleidoscopic effect of interior thought.

Witness Back at Me draws on the childhood loss of Chan’s mother to breast cancer, as a survival mechanism towards an aesthetics of accepted disembodiment, always haunted by a search for nurturing and surrender to some greater being. The poems in this book intertwine polyvocally, building into a liminal biographical metanarrative: the whole point of existence, the author believes, is to luxuriate in the greater being of not-knowing. To accept the historical underpinnings, the brokenness of the world, inside and outside the self, but be in constant communication of both worlds, towards understanding and healing, is the one true meaningful quest.

Recipient of the 2021 Writer’s Trust Latner-Griffin Poetry Prize, Weyman Chan lives and works in Mohkinstsis (Calgary) on Treaty 7 Territory. His second book, Noise From the Laundry, was a finalist for the 2008 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Chan is a member of the filling Station magazine poetry collective. He is also working on a book of hybrid poetic fiction, Chronicle of a Sleep Tower. Weyman Chan’s notable past works include Human Tissue: a primer for Not Knowing (Talonbooks, 2016), which traces the making of monsters – real and metaphysical – when faced with unreliable creation narratives; and Witness Back at Me: mismothering and transmigration (Talonbooks, 2022), an intersectional biography of the author’s spiritual partnership with the late poet Sharron Proulx-Turner.