The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak

Guernica Editions (First Poets Series)

9781771835879

70 pages | May 1, 2021

Lau’s work lurches off the page and seizes your hand like an old friend that cannot wait to catch up with you; you learn of the speaker’s romantic escapades, their family, their hurts old and new. Reading this collection makes you feel reached out to, and that is no small feat in a time everything and everyone can seem very, very far away.

Canthius Magazine

Ripe with intention and embroidered with the tiny pinpricks of pain, her language, the one she discovers alone in the dark, where we have all been left for so long, is naked, free of ballast as a sinking ship that does not sink but sails into the next sunrise, truth.

Grace Lau’s debut poetry collection is blessed by fine details—fine details that hold immense meaning. Multi-generational histories steep in Grandma’s cup of cha. A lifetime of queer desire knits along with the poet’s own skinned knees. Lau’s refined poetic lines and crisp stanzas ask us to slow down the pace of our reading, so we too can discover the deep substance of each image and word.

Amber Dawn, author of My Art Is Killing Me and Other Poems

Grace Lau’s poetry will saunter into a room inside of your heart, take a seat in the front row, and stay there for weeks. These poems bravely make their way into the lonely corners and abandoned underbellies of some very painful places: a childhood closet, a complicated inheritance, forsaken faith, queer love, and family, to name just a few, and somehow render these memories into heirlooms. I read these poems once to discover what this poet has given us, and will now read them again and again, in order to truly unwrap and cherish her gifts.

Ivan Coyote, storyteller and author of Rebent Sinner

The poems in Grace Lau’s debut collection, The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak embody wryness, curiosity, and care.

Leanne Dunic, The Capilano Review

• Arc Poetry Magazine Newsletter, Feb. 2021: Grace Lau interviewed as an emerging poet about to take the CanLit poetry scene by storm!
• Canadian Independent Booksellers' Associatoin (CIBA) recommends The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak
• CBC's 55 Canadian poetry collections to check out in spring 2021
• CBC Books: How recounting the past in poetry form helps Grace Lau find peace with her family and identity
• All Lit Up: 32 Books for Asian Heritage Month
• All Lit Up: Read This, Then That: Reflections on Diasporic Identity

Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry