“How wonderful is it to be a poet and invent such useful and meaningful words as 'otherwhere' or 'betweenships'! Marlatt takes full advantage of her licence to play with words and syntax so as to conflate time and sense.”
—Ormsby Review

“Some of Daphne Marlatt’s early writings on her family history, Month of Hungry Ghosts, appeared in The Capilano Review alongside some of my own work on family stories. This was in 1979 and I’ve read and admired Daphne’s work ever since. Her new book Then Now is a deep and intimate study of her father’s bachelor life in Penang in the 1930s. The story is enriched by poems that respond to that long-ago journey and the result is beautifully evocative and compelling.”
—Michael Ondaatje

“Exquisitely explored, the epistemology of a father’s letters reaching out by sea, wanting to touch something familiar, arrives at inbetweenness where time and distance continue building varieties of relationships. Re-inhabiting these material objects, his daughter Daphne Marlatt, now a hybrid bodily being armed with an empathy toward unknowns, shows us how to accountably return our travels to the land we visit.”
—Laiwan

“Reading Daphne Marlatt’s Then Now is intimate, extraordinary, destabilizing. I love this book.”
—Madeleine Thien