Rain in Plural

Rain in Plural by Fiona Sze-Lorrain (Princeton University Press, 2020)

The highly anticipated new collection from a poet whose previous book was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. To purchase, please click here (US) or here (Europe, UK, Asia, and elsewhere), or at the press website.

Rain in Plural is the much-anticipated fourth collection of poetry by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, who has been praised by The Rumpus as “a master of musicality and enlightening allusions.” In the wholly original world of these new poems, Sze-Lorrain addresses both private narratives and the overexposed discourse of the polis, using silence and montage, lyric and antilyric, to envision what she calls “creating between liberties.”

The poems travel from Shanghai, Singapore, Kyoto, Taipei and Sumatra to New York and the American West to Milan and back to Paris. With a moral precision embracing us without eschewing I, she rethinks questions of citizenship, the selections of sensory memory, and, by extension, the tether of word and image to the actual. She writes, “I accept the truth in newspapers / by holding the murder of my friends against my chest. // To each weather forecast I give thanks: / merci for every outdated // dusk/dawn.” Agrippina the Younger, Franz Kafka, Bob Dylan, a butoh performance, an unnamed Raku tea bowl—each has a place here. Made whole by time and its alteration in timelessness, synchrony, coincidences, and accidents, Rain in Plural beautifully reveals an elegiac yet ever-evolving inner life.

Rain in Plural has been highlighted as one of the nine major collections by writers veteran and new in Library Journal:

In an elegy to her grandmother, Sze-Lorrain observes, “Now I touch its skin, the cream of being alive,” distancing herself with that pronoun while asking what we are: body, memory, relationships? She then proceeds to arc astonishingly through human experience. Part 1 is personal, revealing that in our containedness, we still live richly if we learn to look outward and live in “used spaces.” A speaker standing near-naked in a barn registers anxiety, desire, and above all watchfulness, key to our capacity to frame and reframe the world not through bludgeoning but re-seeing (and thence language, “pushy as ever,” with ­”strangers in the midst of longing and speech.”) For though “goats do not prepare/ for rain or transition,” we do; a monk asked to “reclock the emptiness./ …showed me how/ to leave each window outside.” The remaining sections open up to the world, with Part 2 acknowledging our “grueling times/ grueling politics”; Part 3, how we knock up against “time and the body, a diurnal tyranny,” experience ever mediated; Part 4, the importance of place; and Part 5, everyday frustrations small and large. A splendid follow-up to the LJ best-booked The Ruined Elegance with broader appeal.

“Dazzling Fiona Sze-Lorrain refreshes our sense of time in her newest volume, the marvelously manifold Rain in Plural. Here, where the sea can be kept in a box, an airport has a skeleton and a nervous system, and both a wedding and heart surgery are scheduled ‘to put the past behind,’ she also transforms our sense of space. As if this poet were employing watercolor techniques, Sze-Lorrain builds up her drolly profound images. From ‘a favorite samurai’ to a dictator’s dog, in the brilliant polycultural world she conjures we’re suddenly everywhere at once, making Rain in Plural a book to absorb as one absorbs a vision.”—Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst: Poems and Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems

“Rain in Plural is a cause for celebration. In recent years, when the world has become too wearying for me, I’ve looked to the poetry of Fiona Sze-Lorrain for her inventive lyricism and her radiant intelligence. There is an exquisite music in this work that is unlike anything else in contemporary poetry. The elegant psychological narratives of these poems can be both troubling and consoling, yet they emerge as compellingly as one’s own suppressed dreams. Sze-Lorrain’s poetry exists in an artistic landscape that echoes Antonioni’s sensual intellectual acuity as well as Eric Rohmer’s bemused tenderness. Rain in Plural is a collection of glorious and absolute brilliance.”—David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems

Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a poet, translator, editor, and zheng harpist. She is the author of three previous poetry collections, including The Ruined Elegance (Princeton), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She has also translated more than a dozen books of contemporary Chinese, French, and American poetry. Her latest translation is contemporary Chinese poet Yin Lichuan’s Karma (Tolsun Books, 2020). She lives in Paris.

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