TENDERFront Cover
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ISBN: 9781772012514 | Paperback

144 pages | Pub. Date: 20200415
6 W × 9 H × 0.368 D inches
Backlist | Poetry | Bisac: BIO032000
Rights: WORLD

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TENDER
By Laiwan

Within the contours of TENDER lie field notes from a life lived across multiple affinities, kinships, and desires. Equally visual and textual, TENDER is a beautifully complex collection spanning thirty years of curious inquiry into our shared human–animal condition. Laiwan traverses diverse terrains – the body, land, language – which are rooted in her courageous and uncompromising history of activism and in experiences of building community across and beyond difference. TENDER offers a radical and decolonizing cleansing of all that oppresses and alienates.

The words and images in this collection reveal the heroic struggles of gendered, raced, and sexual differences from a place of incredible tenderness and vulnerability. Laiwan’s words imprint in us the need to breathe our animal skins back to life after the scarring of fearful states of abandonment and betrayal. Read as a retrospective and as a continued call for a passionate caring for one another, TENDER offers us freedom in the face of limitation: a working at setting free. Each section of the book captures a moment in time and feeling. Ghostly images are choreographed to leave us alerted to longing and hope, absence and presence. It is as if the entire collection were a garden at different stages of growth, with the inevitable decay and renewal that each season brings. Haunting, political, and defiantly sexy, Laiwan’s voice is a guiding force.

"Laiwan's poetry moves between myth and minutiae with bright, buoyant optimism."
—Rebecca Peng, Rungh Magazine

By Laiwan

Laiwan is a visual artist, writer, activist, thinker, speaker, and educator in Vancouver, British Columbia. It has been said that she is reticent and modest, shying away from the spectacular, and these traits may belie the cosmopolitan and eclectic sources of her thought, as what she produces is so often surprising, even in its exploration of the ephemeral.

Read more about Laiwan

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news | 2020-12-17
Talonbooks Fall 2020 Launch!

…read from Earle Street . Laiwan will read from TENDER . Gladys Maria Hindmarch will read from Wanting …

news | 2020-03-24
An excerpt from Laiwan's new book, TENDER

…of the world,” a poem from Laiwan’s TENDER , which just arrived in-house at Talon. Pick up … your copy of TENDER today! a celebration of spring, the coming of …

news | 2020-03-16
Talonbooks' Spring 2020 Launch: Postponed

…. Margaret Christakos: Charger . Laiwan: TENDER . Mercedes Eng: my yt mama . …

news | 2020-03-04
TENDER has arrived in-house!

…that Laiwan’s debut book of poetry, TENDER , is fresh from the press! Within the contours of … TENDER lie field notes from a life lived across multiple … kinships, and desires. Visual and textual, TENDER is a beautifully complex collection spanning … building community across and beyond difference. TENDER offers a radical and decolonizing cleansing of … oppresses and alienates. Pick up your copy of TENDER today! …

news | 2020-01-22
Laiwan: WANDER: Toward a Lightness of Being, in Vancouver

…Talon author Laiwan, whose poetry book TENDER is forthcoming this Spring, has just unveiled a …

news | 2019-09-10
I Saw Three Ships Sets Sail

…of the West End. Sometimes twisted, sometimes tender, I Saw Three Ships will speak to all who have …

news | 2019-02-15
A Bouquet of Delights: My Heart Is a Rose Manhattan has arrived!

…book about grief and isolation. Cutting yet tender, sorrowful yet angry, these poems touch on death …

news | 2016-10-24
Our Fall 2016 books are launched!

…Host/Talon editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji with bartender/Talon art director Les Smith Meredith Quartermain …

news | 2016-07-20
Tomorrow! Carl Peters talks Gertrude Stein at People’s Co-op Books, Vancouver

…of Gertrude Stein’s seminal modernist text, Tender Buttons (1914), and will discuss her poetry in … an annotated study of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (Talon, 2016). Join Peters for the talk …

news | 2016-04-27
Photos from our big launch last night

…Studies in Description: Reading Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons – first a short Stein poem, then his own …