A piece of paper with writing on it is flat, but when what is written on
that paper fills the mind of a reader, it takes off into the wind like a
box kite on a windy day, writes Baziju -- the shared voice of poets Roo
Borson and Kim Maltman. This exquisite, collaboratively written sequence
of prose poems, unfolding through rich, delicate imagery, journeys
through streets and gardens, houses and temples, cities and countryside,
Canada and China. It is a meditation on the way we travel between places
and between times, and how words and ideas travel between languages.
Baziju explores the literature of China, from centuries past to the
present, exploring, at the same time, the meaning of hope and of home:
childhood homes, the homes we grow into, and the homes in our minds. In
Lu Xun's classic story My Old Home, the hero returns from a distant city
to the home he left two decades earlier. Hope, he ponders, is just like
the roads of the earth... . [T]o begin with the earth has no roads,
but where many people pass, there a road is made.
These sensual, deeply personal prose poems ponder change, loss,
friendship, and belonging. In a life in which every detail has
significance, the smallest observation grows, and spreads like the
branches of wisteria.
