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The Sacred Heart Motel

$18.95

Grace Kwan

Fall 2024

Available for pre-order!

In poet Grace Kwan’s debut, they are ruthless and nimble, guiding us through the recesses of body and roadside space. The reader tours the motel through this multiverse narrative, from amenities to rooms to back alleys, through the generations of ghosts and queer love stories, until they are left alone with the heart at the centre. The Sacred Heart Motel is a disorienting, startling collection about placelessness and longing.

Grace Kwan is a Malaysian-born sociologist and writer based in “Vancouver,” the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Their recent poetry appears in Canthius, Room Magazine, and others. Find them at https://grckwn.wordpress.com/.

Available on backorder

Category:

Author: Grace Kwan

ISBN: 9781998898169 (print)

ISBN: 9781998898183 (PDF)

ISBN: 9781998898176 (EPUB)

Cover art by Niki Hoi

  • Paperback, 104 pages
  • Printed in Quebec
  • Published  2024

“One of the sheer brilliances of Kwan’s book is turning migration into a love poem and love into a migration. Don’t even try to separate the political from the personal; there are too many transient rooms in the heart, unregistered hearts in any given room. And, of course, there’s the border – of desire, home, identity – where all the action happens: ‘the convergence of lives, motivations / riding shotgun,’ as Kwan puts it, or rather wrenches it from our very hearts.”

—Carlos A. Pittella, recipient of a Frontier 2022 Global Poetry Prize

“’I’m sick / of outsourcing care to desire’ writes Grace Kwan in this sure-footed, arrestingly wise début, and this axis, between fantasies of belonging and the experience of being held, is perhaps at the core of the book, threaded through each poem. If ‘again and again I’ve abandoned my urgency / for the romance of cruelty,’ how does that self in each of us return?”

—River Halen, author of Dream Rooms