listen; read because
beauty was once a country
I belonged to now I’m a migrant
placeless and still hovering
on the limn trying on wages
radium and high heels as a second language
debossed in cracked leather
bleeding like citizens onto onion skin.
—Grace Kwan (from “Gender Studies” in The Sacred Heart Motel)
Grace Kwan is a Malaysian-born immigrant settler based in “Vancouver,” the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Their first full-length poetry collection, The Sacred Heart Motel, will be published by Metonymy Press in the Fall.
The Sacred Heart Motel is a memory palace that Kwan created by dividing their book into seven sections, all based on different parts of this imagined motel. In their words:
The Sacred Heart Motel is a rest stop where a wandering soul in search of belonging hovers between life and death. A heart is a hotel, a site of mystery and romance, a storied and placeless landmark, a point where people converge and ultimately disperse. These poems give life to a heart with no skin or ribcage, pummelling open air with ruthless vulnerability.
They began this project by imagining it as a map, “first for myself, then for other wanderers who might also find themselves lost and looking for something they can’t find,” Kwan told Metonymy Press. From there emerged the book’s form: The Sacred Heart Motel—a locationless place that takes form in the pages of this poetry collection.
Kwan drew inspiration for their debut collection from Heather O’Neill’s novel The Lonely Hearts Hotel and their fascination for “the romance of hotels and motels as sites where abstract ideas such as placelessness, haunting, and memory could be situated,” they explained.
The author spent a lot of time on the road with their parents growing up, so the metaphor of The Sacred Heart Motel embodies, for them, the loneliness, wandering, and unbelonging that permeates the collection with every poem.
Among the many references in this book is a golden shovel after Ocean Vuong’s famous quote, “I might still be too young in my grief to know where it ends.” Kwan’s poem, entitled “Tsurune,” starts like this:
The pain demands I
look up to a scene of might
and beauty. I’ve still
loved in rain, to be
honest, its scent and veil too.
“Tsurune” is clearly in conversation with more than just this Vuong quote; it is reminiscent of his poetry about the loss of his mother and takes from the theme of grief in his work. Kwan says that they wrote this golden shovel as a way to process cutting off their parents while writing and editing The Sacred Heart Motel.
Kwan immigrated to Vancouver in 2007, when they were eight years old. They write about their experiences from places they call home, but with the growing debate on what constitutes “CanLit” and “the Canadian canon,” they don’t feel that their work should be read only in conversation with CanLit writers. They added,
I draw inspiration from sources too heterogeneous, varied, and global for me to feel okay with my work (and my own identity as a writer) being pinned to this category—especially given my thematic preoccupation with diasporas and displacement, which upsets the very idea of Canadianness.
CanLit is also often used to form an identity for a closed community of writers and can be weaponized by white scholars to devalue their students, Kwan mentioned.
They recently earned their MA in sociology at Simon Fraser University and are planning on applying to be a PhD candidate in the next year. The thesis for their master’s degree “explored Asian diasporic literature and cultural production as a site of identity formation,” they explained. Kwan specified that their research has influenced their poetry as much as their poetry has influenced their academic writing.
When asked whom they hope to reach with The Sacred Heart Motel, Kwan answered that romantics, aesthetes, eldest immigrant daughters, “and anyone who has experienced displacement of any kind” would find something for them in this collection. But even if you don’t ascribe to any of these categories, you are still likely to appreciate Kwan’s lyrical imagery and confessional poetry that makes readers question their own experiences and surroundings.
