A Child's Seance

A Child’s Seance begins when a brother and sister attempt to contact the spirit of their dead mother. As they play, their shared grief explodes into a big bang of questions about the universe’s smeared complexity.

Weyman Chan’s far-reaching poetry offers a surreal, astral travelogue that bears the ghost brush of classical Chinese portraiture. Its figures pose against a prairie landscape that steels resilience against loss, mental struggles, sexual misfires, and threats of alien abduction. Working across the intimate, the historical, and the cosmic, A Child’s Seance validates the human experiment and its chaos, asking what the poem and its syntactical palette can catch of our fleeting, all-too-brief lives. It insists that the worlds we intersect, however messy or unreachable, are still all one.