Drawing on biology, myth, ecology, and the anthropocalypse, Weyman Chan’s poetry interrogates fear’s flight from embodiment and one soul’s struggle to stake everything on what makes us human.

Suffused with a collage-like immersion of stream-of-conscious voices, Witness Back at Me parallels Chan’s childhood loss of his mother to breast cancer with the loss of his Two-Spirit Métis friend and mentor, writer Sharron Proulx-Turner.

This book’s metanarratives reach way back, then return us to our shared history of a broken world, made anew. The biography of the land, always the land, must be listened to. Only the keepers of that humility will source our not-knowing and teach us how to be.