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The Ink Cloud Reader

Kit Fan

Ink Cloud Reader
10% off all versions
Categories: 21st Century, British, China, Ecopoetry, LGBTQ+
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (96 pages)
(Pub. Apr 2023)
9781800173149
£12.99 £11.69
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Apr 2023)
9781800173156
£10.39 £9.35
To use the EPUB version, you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed on your device. You can find out more at https://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html. Please do not purchase this version if you do not have and are not prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions.
  • Description
  • Author
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023
    Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023

    A The Irish Times Book of the Year

    In his disquieting third collection The Ink Cloud Reader, Kit Fan takes enormous risks linguistically, formally and visually to process the news of a sudden illness and the threat of mortality, set against the larger chaos of his beloved city Hong Kong and our broken planet. These shape-shifting poems are sensitive to anxiety and to beauty, questioning the turbulent climate of our time while celebrating the power of ink – of reading and writing.
    Kit Fan is a poet, novelist and critic born and educated in Hong Kong before moving to the UK at twenty-one. His first poetry collection, Paper Scissors Stone (2011), won the Hong Kong University International Poetry Prize. As Slow as Possible (2018) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and one of ... read more
    Awards won by Kit Fan Short-listed, 2023 The T.S. Eliot Prize (The Ink Cloud Reader) Short-listed, 2023 The Forward Prize for Best Collection
    (The Ink Cloud Reader)
    '...an impressively skilful, dazzlingly inventive and sometimes moving book that speaks strongly to the confusions of contemporary life.'

    Edmund Prestwich, The North
    'A moving, lyrically potent collection charting the interconnected impacts of political and personal fracture... Here the losses of place and the losses of the body tumble into each other, creating a painfully raw yet deeply affecting poetic universe.'
    Rebecca Tamás, The Guardian
    'Kit Fan's poems are a kind of lyric vortex: imagistic fictions that wrap themselves around a hard, lyrical, personal centre, something like the complexity of a seed. This collection holds at its core the tension of what to say and how to say it, gloriously in celebration of ambivalence, and questioning.'
    Rachael Allen
    'The compressed narratives in The Ink Cloud Reader demonstrate both lyric intensity and a remarkable dramatic reach. In this impressive third collection, Kit Fan's restless, explorative, compositional impulse is evident from first to last [...] The poems in this collection - personal, political, edgy, sometimes provocative - have a unifying voice both intriguing and wholly original.'
    David Harsent
    'In The Ink Cloud Reader, Kit Fan's moving, wise and fluid poems grapple with the forces 'converting loss to some form / of chaos'. The book's vivid portrait of a marriage, quickened by sickness and the threat of separation, presents love as a play of shadow and light. Fan gets stranger, more daring, with each successive book: he is an essential poet, and one I will always return to.'
    Sarah Howe
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