Jody Chan, Madness Belongs to the People

 

Don don ko doko doko. Don don ko doko doko! Taiko repertoire is often taught orally, relying on repetition. I learnt to drum through kuchi shōga, a system of call-and-response phonetic notation. The body learns first, then the mind follows. Vibrations felt in our feet, in our instruments’ round faces. In the streets, too, I’ll follow any megaphone. I believe that we will win, I chant obediently, even when I don’t. Without context, can language be trusted? Can sound? (“ECHOLALIA”)

Toronto-based “poet, multidisciplinary artist, care worker, and community organizer” Jody Chan’s third full-length collection, and the first I’ve seen, is Madness Belongs to the People (Prince Edward County ON: Brick Books, 2026), following sick (Black Lawrence Press, 2020) and impact statement (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2024). Madness Belongs to the People offers itself as a book-length suite of first-person narrative fragments, prose poems and more traditional lyrics that deceptively hold a kind of accumulative through-line, propulsive through language of dense prose and lyric gymnastics. “where once you heard the cymbal / sing, dream house inside out, what luck when the performance // does not take place on this page,” Chan writes, as part of the poem “(audio score:,” “when the poem contacts not // a square of sanity, not one. madness describes / an energetic state.” Moving through all three of her book-titles alone, the notion of illness is a thread that connects the three titles, and the poems of Madness Belongs to the People work to articulate and document. As the back cover offers, this collection “mobilizes the intimate, the historical, the revolutionary, and the mundane to investigate madness as resistance and political strategy,” a curious element for the larger tapestry of the book’s structure. Chan’s poems articulate how mental illness marginalizes and stigmatizes, as well as reduces, erasing the possibility of how anyone gets seen beyond their illness. Instead, Chan offers a way through destigmatizing through democracizing, “for the people,” as it were, seeing how not so far apart we all might be, comparable to other recent titles such as Roxanna Bennett’s We Gladly Feast on Those Who Would Subdue Us (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2026) [see my review of such here], Steffi Tad-y’s Notes from the Ward (Gordon Hill Press, 2025) [see my review of such here], AJ Dolman’s Crazy/Mad (Gordon Hill Press, 2024) [see my review of such here] or Concetta Principe’s DISORDER (Gordon Hill Press, 2024) [see my review of such here]. Set itself as an accumulation of fragments, Chan’s title sequence includes: “I want to take care of the parts of myself I can’t change.” Or a bit further, as the poem “MADNESS IS A STRATEGY” includes:

Madness disturbs the book. Anger bubbles the page, blooms a
gathering. A red breach I tend to boil over. The place my
madness knows as home: a low-pressure front, a reservoir of
panic. A muscular humidity, threatening heat. 

 

 

To the state, mass murder is a matter of economy. Years into a
pandemic, masking becomes an uncommon accommodation.
Words interrupt, but they cannot solve. Not anger alone,
translated into bodies in the street. A call-and-response of
strategy and pragmatism is not sufficient. Language cannot
replace movement, only approximate it.

Hari Alluri, Tabako on the Windowsill

  

Windowsill Offering for Eric

In the crematorium’s service room, taking clumsy, ginger turns around the cardboard holding your body, such a thin distance, 4 generations of multi-iteration family scrawl and draw our messages for you to take. An act of reaching. Even here, the squeal and fight of children over markers carries what’s most sombre.

This act of releasing you to mark how we must begin to hold you another way, a promise in touch, which no one can live up to constant: from outside the chapel’s doors, through the service room, around and down the hall—Sade’s “By Your Side” playing off your celebrant’s phone as we arrange ourselves—one hand reaching forward to the next shoulder, in to the shoulders of your closest and your closest blood, finally onto Niki’s.

Hers, the most difficult task. Even as it’s her finger on the switch: when she presses it to give your body to fire—held and utterly alone—none of us are free of it. Our hope, which is also our fear: that we reach across to the other side with you, that the messages we wrote carry us with them in the flame.

The latest poetry title by British Columbia-based “a migrant poet of Filipinx and South Asian descent” Hari Alluri is the collection Tabako on the Windowsill (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2025), a book I’m just getting to now. Subtitled “(poems to burn),” Alluri’s first-person narratives offer quiet gestures composed as direct response, akin to elegy or prayer, both for and to the living, and the dead. “May you outgrow many pairs of shorts, Anak. / And if a dryer doesn’t get them first,” begins the poem “Mountain Walk Offering for My Godson,” “your socks might inch down past your heels / bothering your arch and toes. That pattern will turn / to wearing thin, to changing style.” There’s a calming, soothing effect in Alluri’s lyrics—a gentle and attentive intimacy—even as losses compound across these meditations, so, too, the celebration of life and family, heart and the present moment. These are poems of witness, of gesture, attempting to articulate, appreciate and hold (“capture” doesn’t seem the right word, here) a moment, before it might fade. “Here, on the morning ride to work,” Alluri writes, as part of “A Pavement Sweeper’s Quarry,” “I’m jealous at the trolley doors: they get / to yawn. I would say the city is only mouth if it didn’t hear: we want to stay.”

The strength of these poems are found precisely through the understated way they’re written, attending and appreciating what so often isn’t noticed, caught or spoken. “I will always thank the day I turned towards these mountains here and saw / not the country I feared wants me dead or gone or totally subsumed,” he writes, as part of “Hum Its Dizziness Like Sugar in Tea,” “but / mountains, volcanic. Cousins / to those who made the islands my nanay is from, and beautiful even if they weren’t. // The deities I brought with me and seek, may they never become a pipeline dug into this land.” It might seem out of fashion to compose poems so overtly thankful, both for those the narrator has known and where he now lives, but Alluri manages a grace through the hush, across the foundations of human connection. As well, moving through prose poems, couplets and more traditional lyric stanza-blocks, the twists and turns of Alluri’s sentences and phrases are subtle, offering twists that hide in plain sight, shifting an effect of what one reads against what one might expect to read. The effect, to be sure, is quite striking. This is a book that will absolutely surprise.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Christine Wu

Christine Wu is the author of Familial Hungers (Brick Books, 2025) which was longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award and shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award and the J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award. She serves as Reviews Editor for The Fiddlehead and currently lives in Mi'kma'ki, on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book, Familial Hungers, showed me it was possible to be a writer. Previously, being a published writer seemed like a childhood dream, an impossibility in the face of economic realities and what I perceived to be my capabilities as a poet. Committing to and completing the work (and receiving support—practical, emotional, and financial) was eye-opening and life-changing for me, to see that it was possible. My current work feels both like a continuation of my first book and also something completely different—it takes a wider lens to childhood/adolescence, life and death, faith and disillusionment. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I actually came to fiction first! When I was 16 I was convinced I wanted to write novels, because that’s what I primarily read. When I started studying creative writing at the University of Victoria I quickly realized I didn’t have the patience for fiction while also falling in love with poetry.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes

My overall writing process is quite slow. I spend most of this time (weeks, months) mulling over thoughts and feelings before committing something to the page. Once the first lines of a poem appear in my head, the rest of the poem follows quite quickly and poems usually emerge pretty close to their final form.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

A poem begins with a single thought or emotion that I will jot down on an index card. So far, I’ve mostly worked on book-length projects, I think because I get caught on an idea and want to explore it to its fullest before letting it go.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love doing public readings and see it as the other side of the “work” – connecting with others and filling my social well. I’m often inspired to keep going when I hear others read from their work but ultimately my creative process requires a lot of unstructured time and solitude.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Something I wrestled with a lot when writing Familial Hungers was how to write about the effects of colonialism with the language of the colonizer (i.e. English). Audre Lorde’s quote about ‘the Master’s tools’ comes to mind here, although perhaps I’m thinking about it in too limited a way. Language shapes thought and culture in such foundational ways and I’m always thinking about the way the English language shapes my work despite efforts toward resistance. I’m interested in both working with and against the limitations of language.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

There are so many possible roles for writers I’m not sure there’s any one answer to this question. I’d like to think that among the possibilities are the ways writers can notice/witness and point out what might be otherwise missed in our busy capitalist societies.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Working with a good editor is absolutely essential—someone else’s eye can always offer new insight and growth to the work.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

“I keep saying it doesn’t matter, just write something down. Eventually things will distill themselves into something that behaves like poetry.” – Elizabeth Bachinsky

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

My writing routine has more seasonal rhythms than daily rhythms, although I do tend to start each day the same way—with a warm beverage and a book. Throughout the day as ‘poem thoughts’ come to mind I will jot them down onto an index card and eventually these index cards become the starting point for full poems. 

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I try not to agonize over stalled writing, although that’s easier said than done. I’m always reading, and often the magic of inspiration comes from writers I admire.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

            Onions and garlic in the wok, ginger scallion oil, instant ramen broth.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Often literal dreams—a number of poems have been direct translations f dreams that have haunted me upon waking.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Gillian Sze, Jane Wong, Victoria Chang, Grace Lau, Chen Chen, Ocean Vuong, Kayla Czaga, Sharon Olds. Sue Sinclair whose work I studied 20 years ago and later supervised my master’s thesis that became the book Familial Hungers. Phoebe Wang whose work I read while writing my first book who later became my editor for said book.  

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I would like to make a chapbook! I was so determined to write a full-length collection I completely bypassed this rite of passage.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Writing is actually my third career! Previously, I was a campus minister and then a librarian. I’d probably still be a librarian if I had the capacity to do more.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Writing has always been my primary way of wrestling with my thoughts and feelings. I simply can’t imagine functioning without it. Even when I wasn’t professionally writing, I was journalling everyday in an attempt to ‘find out what I [was] thinking’ (a la Joan Didion).

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

To Place a Rabbit by Madhur Anand. I can’t remember the last film I watched!

19 - What are you currently working on?

A collection of poetry about leaving the evangelical Church and losing my late father, and the ways these two experiences intersect with and complicate one another.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Christine Wu, familial hungers: poems

 

THE TASTE EQUIVALENT OF A GLIMPSE

Gustatory wink, olfactory flicker, food
flashback. A resuscitation
that rockets by, a blur that ignites
sleeping palates, lightning jolt
just out of reach and not quite enough
to awaken the full-flavour dream, leaving
behind a full-bodied craving. No words
for this brief animal possession. Fleeting
infuriating, unannounced, swift knock
on the door of nostalgia, ding-dong ditch
at the mouth of memory.

I’m only just now getting to the full-length poetry debut by Halifax-based Vancouver poet Christine Wu, her familial hungers: poems (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2025), a collection that describes itself as a “lyric feast,” as the poems that make up the collection purposefully write through and around food, and into a foundation of family. “The only way my mother knows how to say hello: / a three-minute broth awaiting my prodigal return // at midnight, ” the poem “THREE-MINUTE LOVE LETTER” begins, “filling the space between hunger / and sustenance, waxen strands in a bath // of rehydrated crystals, silver foil sachet packed / with the myths of MSG that keeps white ghosts away.” Wu writes on family turmoil and childhood memories, and the collisions of language and culture, offering a way through food as both foundation, and a means through articulating the conflicts and the discomforts, the unspoken, and what should never have been. Wu writes food, whether preparation, shared meals or particular dishes, as a cultural and familial underpinning, impossible to distinguish from the rest of her upbringing. As the poem “WHY I STOPPED COMING HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS” begins: “Because I was scheduled to work. because flight costs / kept going up. Because I was embarrassed // by your accent. Because I hated Chinese / school. Because rice. Because teenage angst // never ends. Because he hit me when he was angry / and called it discipline. Because you did not stop him.”

Set in four titled groupings of first-person lyric narrative poems—“Residue of Hunger,” “Offerings at the Altar,” “Shadow Histories” and the title section, “Familial Hungers”—Wu’s poems provide a kind of landscape across the messiness of family, and family residue, and attempting to find where the narrator might themselves land, amid this background. It is through these poems that Wu attempts to reconcile not only her threads of history, but how she herself fits into the narrative of those threads, within it, from her research into various imperial and colonial occupations, articulated specifically through the poem “ANCESTRY.COM HAS NOTHING ON ME,” to exactly what she, in the end, might inherit. “Maybe this insatiable thirst is punishment // for my secret sham: those childhood nights / I stole away from the table,” she writes, near the end of the poem “WHEN ASKED WHY ALL MY POEMS ARE ABOUT SOUP,” “leaning into being // part of a family that’d stopped eating / together, crowded out by silence and hoarded // trauma.” This is a book about examining and reconciling large histories, both immediate and a few steps removed, and that natural impulse to not only discover who we are, but decide, as well, what of the past we might wish to still carry.

WHAT WE INHERIT

Metal tong wan molds.
The holy trinity: ginger, garlic, scallions.
A recipe for pork and watercress jiaozi.
The ability to sleep on a pull-out couch
and call it good. The ability to eat
steamed white rice and call it home.
History of the Great Leap Forward
and the forty-five million who starved. Midnight ramen.
Immigrant instinct to feed every last hungry ghost.