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You Are Not Who You Claim
At eighteen, Evelyn Lau published a journal of her life on "the streets" and her experiences with drugs and prostitution. Runaway was a chronicle of harsh survival, pain, and an obsession with writing which helped provide an escape from the deadness of the street. For her, poetry was the voice of the hope and the disillusionment that she felt as she passed from the innocence of a young girl down through the confusing hell of the street and into the often harsher realities of the "straight" world. Strong, intimate, disturbing and finally poignant, Evelyn Lau's poems are really about people, trapped and hurting behind their many masks of conformity.
"Evelyn Lau is the poet I've been waiting for . . . . She has the experience and street-learned savvy to see the cruel hoax that idiots and hypocrites call civilization. Her lines and images are compellingly fresh. Her observations are free of literary jargon. If early success doesn't weaken her rage, doesn't soften her indictments, her future success is inevitable."
- Irving Layton
"Evelyn Lau is the poet I've been waiting for . . . . She has the experience and street-learned savvy to see the cruel hoax that idiots and hypocrites call civilization. Her lines and images are compellingly fresh. Her observations are free of literary jargon. If early success doesn't weaken her rage, doesn't soften her indictments, her future success is inevitable."
- Irving Layton
- GenresPoetry
59 pages, Paperback
First published March 16, 1994
1 person is currently reading
45 people want to read
About the author
Evelyn Lau
24 books79 followersEvelyn Lau was born July 2, 1971 in Vancouver, British Columbia to Chinese-Canadian parents, who intended for her to eventually become a doctor. Her parents' ambitions for her were wholly irreconcilable with her own; consequently, her home and school lives were desperately unhappy. In 1986 she ran away from her unbearable existence as a pariah in school and tyrannized daughter at home.
Lau began publishing poetry at the age of 12; her creative efforts helped her escape the pressure of home and school. In 1985, at age 14, Lau left home and spent the next several years living itinerantly in Vancouver as a homeless person, sleeping mainly in shelters, friends' homes and on the street and often supporting herself by selling her body to much older men.
Despite the chaos of her first two years' independence she submitted a great deal of poetry to journals and received some recognition. A diary she kept at the time was published in 1989 as Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid. The book was a critical and commercial success. Topics and individuals discussed in the book include some of Lau's various relationships with manipulative older men, the life and habits of a group of anarchists with whom she stayed immediately after leaving home, Lau's experiences with a couple from Boston who smuggled her into the United States, her abuse of various drugs, and her relationship with British Columbia's child support services. The film The Diary of Evelyn Lau (1993) starred Korean-Canadian actress Sandra Oh.
Lau had a well-publicized romantic relationship with University of Victoria creative writing professor and author W. P. Kinsella which led to the filing of a libel case against her[3]. She currently lives in Vancouver, where she freelances as a manuscript consultant in Simon Fraser University's Writing and Publishing Program. For invitations to poetry readings and festivals, the author may be contacted through Oolichan Books.
Lau began publishing poetry at the age of 12; her creative efforts helped her escape the pressure of home and school. In 1985, at age 14, Lau left home and spent the next several years living itinerantly in Vancouver as a homeless person, sleeping mainly in shelters, friends' homes and on the street and often supporting herself by selling her body to much older men.
Despite the chaos of her first two years' independence she submitted a great deal of poetry to journals and received some recognition. A diary she kept at the time was published in 1989 as Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid. The book was a critical and commercial success. Topics and individuals discussed in the book include some of Lau's various relationships with manipulative older men, the life and habits of a group of anarchists with whom she stayed immediately after leaving home, Lau's experiences with a couple from Boston who smuggled her into the United States, her abuse of various drugs, and her relationship with British Columbia's child support services. The film The Diary of Evelyn Lau (1993) starred Korean-Canadian actress Sandra Oh.
Lau had a well-publicized romantic relationship with University of Victoria creative writing professor and author W. P. Kinsella which led to the filing of a libel case against her[3]. She currently lives in Vancouver, where she freelances as a manuscript consultant in Simon Fraser University's Writing and Publishing Program. For invitations to poetry readings and festivals, the author may be contacted through Oolichan Books.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 30, 2008
update: Okay, so it seems a little bit unsophisiticated and melodramatic here & there--but I still like it. It's also quite biting here & there.
And when it comes to guilty pleasure kind of reading, I'll take slightly melodramatic confessional poetry over romance or other genre fare.
*
I was excited to acquire this book because I had gotten the idea in my head that it was hard-to-find, but I recently paid a visit to abe books and there it was.
Anyway, my informal review of this one is probably biased by even more than personal aesthetic. It might also be biased by the fact I had imbibed some tequila shortly before I started reading it last night and by how much I loved Evelyn Lau in the past.
She was one of my favorite poets about fifteen years ago. I loved her poetry collections ‘Oedipal Dreams’ and ‘In the House of Slaves’, which spoke with a raw yet controlled vulnerability on themes of unrequited love, pain, self-destruction, self-control, and power dynamics especially in the context of kinky and imbalanced male/female relationships. Extramarital affairs, dominance and submission, voyeurism and exhibitionism, suicidal urges, feeling empty and longing for love but sublimating with fetishistic sex—I suppose it all sounds a bit melodramatic or maybe even emo-esque—but somehow it worked, because the yearning felt so genuine, the imagery was both titillating and compelling, and the voice of the poems seemed to be driven by an intelligence, an astute power of observation, and a prematurely world-weary sense of experience.
These were poems of bleak disillusionment written in a voice that didn't want to be disillusioned. The tone of many of the poems seemed jaded on the surface, giving way to a painful vulnerability at the core, a combination that the speaker used to flirt with the readers, sometimes even to toy with the readers as though they were bed partners in some tantalizingly dangerous intimate game of cat & mouse—and after the latest round of sexual fetishism had snapped to a close, the reader was left wanting more and so was the speaker—she was unsatisfied, alone, desolate, devastated, and desperate—or sometimes she was muted, numb, and doubtful of her own capacity to experience true emotion and she desired to do something extreme in order to feel something real—pain. She tended to view herself as a game piece, a performer, a doll that could be moved from one position into the next—from room to room, from scene to scene. There was an underlying masochism to all of this that fascinated me on some warped level and really spoke to a younger version of me. I’d like to think those books would still resonate for me, although I haven’t returned to them in recent years, because I don’t want to find out my feelings have changed; I don’t want to ruin the mystique of those books for myself.
It was disappointing enough when I read her latest poetry collection, ‘Treble’ a few years back. I’d been excited to read that one, too, but it just seemed nowhere near as powerful as her earlier material. Her earlier work was presumably bred and fed by her real-life experiences on the streets as a teen, where she became enmeshed in a world of drugs and prostitution. ‘Treble’ is presumably much more distant from such subject matter and draws upon more normal terrain and just seems bland and office-like in comparison. It seems too vanilla.
‘You Are Not Who You Claim’ is Lau’s very first poetry collection, published when she was only 18, which is very young, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would it be even more powerfully raw? Would it be too raw? Would it seem lacking in sophistication or finesse to someone who reads a lot of skillful contemporary poetry?
Well, according to my tequila-laced sensibilities last night, it was quite good, but I don’t remember any of the details—and so I’m going to start my reading experience anew later today and hopefully I won’t be disappointed.
I think I have weird tastes in poetry anyway. Because how come I almost never hear other poets talking about three of the poets I really like—Evelyn Lau, Lyn Crosbie, and Tory Dent?
Maybe my own sensibilities are kind of askew, unsophisticated, and/or uncouth. Oh well.
*
Oh now I just noticed a few notes I jotted down while reading this book last night.
Some of them I can't read or don't really make sense, but I kind of like these two phrases:
'addiction to perverse desire'
&
'the bitterness of wasted naivete'
And when it comes to guilty pleasure kind of reading, I'll take slightly melodramatic confessional poetry over romance or other genre fare.
*
I was excited to acquire this book because I had gotten the idea in my head that it was hard-to-find, but I recently paid a visit to abe books and there it was.
Anyway, my informal review of this one is probably biased by even more than personal aesthetic. It might also be biased by the fact I had imbibed some tequila shortly before I started reading it last night and by how much I loved Evelyn Lau in the past.
She was one of my favorite poets about fifteen years ago. I loved her poetry collections ‘Oedipal Dreams’ and ‘In the House of Slaves’, which spoke with a raw yet controlled vulnerability on themes of unrequited love, pain, self-destruction, self-control, and power dynamics especially in the context of kinky and imbalanced male/female relationships. Extramarital affairs, dominance and submission, voyeurism and exhibitionism, suicidal urges, feeling empty and longing for love but sublimating with fetishistic sex—I suppose it all sounds a bit melodramatic or maybe even emo-esque—but somehow it worked, because the yearning felt so genuine, the imagery was both titillating and compelling, and the voice of the poems seemed to be driven by an intelligence, an astute power of observation, and a prematurely world-weary sense of experience.
These were poems of bleak disillusionment written in a voice that didn't want to be disillusioned. The tone of many of the poems seemed jaded on the surface, giving way to a painful vulnerability at the core, a combination that the speaker used to flirt with the readers, sometimes even to toy with the readers as though they were bed partners in some tantalizingly dangerous intimate game of cat & mouse—and after the latest round of sexual fetishism had snapped to a close, the reader was left wanting more and so was the speaker—she was unsatisfied, alone, desolate, devastated, and desperate—or sometimes she was muted, numb, and doubtful of her own capacity to experience true emotion and she desired to do something extreme in order to feel something real—pain. She tended to view herself as a game piece, a performer, a doll that could be moved from one position into the next—from room to room, from scene to scene. There was an underlying masochism to all of this that fascinated me on some warped level and really spoke to a younger version of me. I’d like to think those books would still resonate for me, although I haven’t returned to them in recent years, because I don’t want to find out my feelings have changed; I don’t want to ruin the mystique of those books for myself.
It was disappointing enough when I read her latest poetry collection, ‘Treble’ a few years back. I’d been excited to read that one, too, but it just seemed nowhere near as powerful as her earlier material. Her earlier work was presumably bred and fed by her real-life experiences on the streets as a teen, where she became enmeshed in a world of drugs and prostitution. ‘Treble’ is presumably much more distant from such subject matter and draws upon more normal terrain and just seems bland and office-like in comparison. It seems too vanilla.
‘You Are Not Who You Claim’ is Lau’s very first poetry collection, published when she was only 18, which is very young, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would it be even more powerfully raw? Would it be too raw? Would it seem lacking in sophistication or finesse to someone who reads a lot of skillful contemporary poetry?
Well, according to my tequila-laced sensibilities last night, it was quite good, but I don’t remember any of the details—and so I’m going to start my reading experience anew later today and hopefully I won’t be disappointed.
I think I have weird tastes in poetry anyway. Because how come I almost never hear other poets talking about three of the poets I really like—Evelyn Lau, Lyn Crosbie, and Tory Dent?
Maybe my own sensibilities are kind of askew, unsophisticated, and/or uncouth. Oh well.
*
Oh now I just noticed a few notes I jotted down while reading this book last night.
Some of them I can't read or don't really make sense, but I kind of like these two phrases:
'addiction to perverse desire'
&
'the bitterness of wasted naivete'
May 25, 2021
This is -- so I'm told -- Lau's first poetry collection which she published when she was just a wee lass at 18. It feels very unpolished and melodramatic, but she's a teen! Who was recently living on the street! Doing drugs! And sex work! She's allowed to be melodramatic!
Some really great lines, though I don't know how I feel on the scansion for most the poetry. I liked all of them, really liked quite a few of them, but loved almost none. I do think that this collection probably requires multiple reads, so I'll see how I feel after I've read it more times. Certainly not a collection that you can power through in a day (well, you could, but why would you want to?). The ones in the latter half of the collection are more my taste than the ones in the front half.
Some really great lines, though I don't know how I feel on the scansion for most the poetry. I liked all of them, really liked quite a few of them, but loved almost none. I do think that this collection probably requires multiple reads, so I'll see how I feel after I've read it more times. Certainly not a collection that you can power through in a day (well, you could, but why would you want to?). The ones in the latter half of the collection are more my taste than the ones in the front half.
July 14, 2025
Evelyn Lau perfectly captures the Vancouver that exists for those struggling the most in that beautiful, suffocating, grey city. The way she crafts each verse is so elegant and authentic, gritty and dreamy at the same time, just like Vancouver. She always knows how to speak directly to my soul. As I see her, I feel her seeing me.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews