PRECEDENTED PARROTING, Barbara Tran

Poetry
ISBN-13: 978-1-990293-64-1
$21.95 CDN / $20.95 US | Trade Paperback
February 2024

Opening with an exit, the poems in Precedented Parroting accept no assumptions. With the determination and curiosity of a problem-solving crow, this expansive debut plumbs personal archives and traverses the natural world, endeavouring to shake the tight cage of stereotypes, Asian and avian. Praised as “lively and intelligent” and “lyrically delicious,” Barbara Tran’s poetry offers us both the keen eye and grace of a hawk, “red-tailed gliding / on time.”

Praise for Precedented Parroting:

Each poem in Precedented Parroting is a singular, sublime murmuration, their words swooping, shape-shifting, and thrumming with life.—Monique Truong, author of The Book of Salt, Bitter in the Mouth, and The Sweetest Fruits

The rhythms and soundscapes in Precedented Parroting are virtuosic. They make me think of waves or air currents that memory, narrative, relationship, and emotion are set loose on. Feathers are composed of barbs, as loss is, observes Tran in the early pages of this book, one implication being that, like feathers, loss can both enable and necessitate flight. An immensely powerful, clear-eyed account of harm, dislocation, and survival through generations.—River Halen, author of Dream Rooms