Honorifics
About this book
Cynthia Miller's debut poetry collection, Honorifics, is an astonishing, adventurous, and innovative exploration of family, Malaysian-Chinese cultural identity, and immigration. From jellyfish blooms to glitch art and distant stars, taking in Greek gods, space shuttles and wedding china along the way, Miller's mesmerizing approach is experimental, luscious, and expansive with longing - "My skin hunger could fill a galaxy".
Here, the poetry is interwoven with the words for all the things we honour – our loved ones and our ancestors, home and homecomings, and all that is precious and makes us feel that we belong and are beloved. It is also a book that examines contemporary issues of migration in sharp and enquiring relief. Language itself becomes a radical power for reimaging, challenging, and making change, and Miller's distinctive and multifaceted poetry creates an extraordinary space for multiplicity and celebration.
'This is language and detail, honed and luxurious. This is space and memory and migratory patterns and fable. An array of formal play and innovation. And everything finely weighted like a gift-box of intricate, interlocking mechanisms.' – Jacob Sam-La Rose
'Honorifics is a dazzlingly inventive collection that circles around themes of love and yearning, family history and migration, with a sophisticated touch. Formally playful, these poems are alive with imagery and a restless intelligence'– Jane Yeh
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Sayang / Sayang
- Portmeirion
- Summer preserves haibun
- Self-portrait as things that let the light in
- Proxima b
- Homecoming
- Malaysiana
- Glitch honorifics
- Dream opera in Kuching
- Yellow
- To become a dragon, first wear its skin
- There is no specific word in English for
- 30 things Sarawakians know
- Feast Day
- Social distancing
- Eurydice video calls her lover in lockdown
- BLOOM
- Sonnet with lighthouses
- The Home Office
- Leave
- Loving v. Virginia
- If given a choice, my boyfriend wants to be immortal
- Scheherezade in the care home
- Abridged dictionary for water babies
- Judith & the head of Holofernes
- The impossible physiology of the free diver
- Moon goddess ghazal
- Birds flimed in slow motion from a moving car
- Shell game
- Persimmon abecedarian
- Lupins
- Paddling at dusk, Winslow Homer, watercolor on paper (1892)
- Drokpa
- How to perfect a flip turn
- Voicemails from my mother
- Notes
- Acknowledgements
- About the author and this book
