Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Fiona Sze-Lorrain Poems

Fiona Sze-Lorrain Biography

Fiona Sze-Lorrain (born 1980) is a French musician, poet, literary translator, and editor. Born in Singapore, she spent her formative years in New York and France. She grew up trilingual and began studying classical piano and guzheng at a young age. A graduate of Columbia University, she obtained her master's degree from New York University before earning a PhD in French from Paris-Sorbonne University. Sze-Lorrain writes mainly in English, and translates from Chinese and French. An editor at Vif Éditions, she has written for venues related to fashion journalism, music and art criticism, and dramaturgy. In 2007, she worked with Gao Xingjian on a book of photography, essays, and poetry based on his film, Silhouette/Shadow. Through Mark Strand, whom she would later translate into French, she found her poetic vocation. A debut poetry collection, Water the Moon, appeared in 2010, followed by My Funeral Gondola in 2013. Prairie Schooner describes her work as an "arc" that "navigates the sense of otherness" with poems that "burst at the seams with the customs, gastronomy, ancestry, literature, and art of the two cultures." Her third collection, The Ruined Elegance, is published by Princeton University Press in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets in 2015/16 and is named one of Library Journal's Best Books in Poetry for 2015. It is also a finalist for the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Currently one of the recognized translators of contemporary Chinese poetry, she is shortlisted for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award and longlisted for the 2014 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She is a co-founder of Cerise Press (2009-13) and a corresponding editor of Mānoa (2012-14). As classical zheng harpist, she has performed worldwide. Her concert venues include Carnegie Hall, Merkin Concert Hall, World Music Hall of Wesleyan University, Maison des cultures du monde, Zuiderpershuis Wereldculturen centrum, Rasa Wereldculturencentrum, UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Musée Cernuschi, and the Orbigny-Bernon Museum.)

The Best Poem Of Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Towering

Are you interested in stealing
instincts? Or in explaining
secrets of a world
that rules with age and equidistance?

Layer by layer, wind
seeks a message,
a voice for Fate. The sun,
its seas,
even birds in passing,
dictate science at the bidding of will.
An existence
unaffected by seasons.

So much about an unfathomable life.
A round universe with plans for tomorrow,
never its final word.

I can't speak for accidents elsewhere,
only forms, lines—
thoughts stretching to dialogue
on charts or water.
Believe me,
answers are small

even if one day you travel
in light years,
even when light becomes endless
as a star dies, another
emerges, in astonishment
and for no reason.

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