Tues 7 Nov
6:30-9pm
Please join us for the launch of Amy Ching-Yan Lam's debut poetry collection, Baby Book. The evening will feature readings from Aurelia Guo, Samra Mayanja, and Amy, as well as a conversation between Amy and Samra.
Direct and humorous, Baby Book stacks story upon story to explore how beliefs are first formed. From a family vacation on a discount bus tour to a cosmogony based on cheese, these poems accumulate around principles of contingency and revelation. Amy Ching-Yan Lam describes the vivid tactility of growth and death—how everything is constantly, painfully remade—offering a vision against the stuck narratives of property and inheritance. Power is located in the senses, in wind: multiple and restless.
Amy Ching-Yan Lam is an artist and writer. Her debut collection of poetry is titled Baby Book (Brick Books, 2023). Other publications include Looty Goes to Heaven (Eastside Projects, 2022) commissioned for the 2022 Commonwealth Games public art program, and Property Journal (forthcoming 2024, Book Works). From 2006 to 2020 she was part of the performance art duo Life of a Craphead. Amy lives in Tkaronto/Toronto and was born in Hong Kong.
Aurelia Guo is a writer and researcher based in London. She is the author of the book of poetry and essays World of Interiors (Divided, 2022), and of the poetry chapbooks 2016 (After Hours Ltd, 2016) and NYT (Gauss PDF, 2018). She is a lecturer in law at London South Bank University.
Samra Mayanja is an artist and writer whose work across various mediums is unified by an obsession with how life speaks poetry. Her work is always seeking form, to move beyond strictures, to be lost and free. The voice, in her work, functions as the search party for the body that she once forgot somewhere over there. Her desire to improvise; to create unfiltered, lucid and meandering utterances, underpins her writing, pedagogy, performance, installation and film works.