An Orange, A Syllable

by Gillian Sze

The latest book by Gillian Sze, author of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award–winning book Quiet Night Think


This prosimetrical work is a meditation on motherhood, language, and art. The central speaker witnesses the earliest utterances of her child and launches into a poetic inquiry of words themselves, asking, How to measure one’s mouth by its words? The speaker seeks an answer amidst the language that surrounds her — words misspoken, mispronounced, remembered, unwritten — and, in doing so, struggles with signification and significance.


Each prose poem in the five-part collection darts between the many meanings of “fit” — as in “a sudden burst of emotion” or “to be the right size and shape,” and the archaic “fytte” (a section of a poem). A text becomes an open mouth, a square day of a calendar, or a bare fragment of a narrative. The final section of the book is an intimate and ekphrastic engagement with the work of Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi. Drawn to Hammershøi’s paintings of the empty rooms of his apartment, the speaker recognizes a familiar space of art’s insistence.


An Orange, A Syllable details a period of maternal and artistic transformation.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

Published September 2, 2025

About the author

GILLIAN SZE is the author of Panicle (ECW Press, 2017), Peeling Rambutan (Gaspereau Press, 2014) and Redrafting Winter (BuschekBooks, 2015), which were shortlisted for the QWF A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. She is also the author of The Anatomy of Clay (ECW Press, 2011) and Fish Bones (DC Books, 2009). More recently, she has started writing for children. Her first two picture books are The Night Is Deep and Wide (Orca, 2021) and My Love for You Is Always (Philomel, 2021). Gillian's work has appeared in a number of national and international journals, and has received awards such as the University of Winnipeg Writers’ Circle Prize and the 3Macs carte blanche Prize. She studied Creative Writing and English Literature and received a Ph.D. in Études anglaises from Université de Montréal. Originally from Winnipeg, she now resides in Montreal.

Reviews

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed these poems!
Thank you to the publisher for my copy!

[Karen Ocana · Rating 5 out of 5]

An Orange, A Syllable

A collection of darknesses and lights
Of tombstones and half-open doorways

A collection of open mouths and outpourings
Of fits, both fluid and frozen in time

A collection of cries, from the first to the last
Of embraces, of the risible, of the perplexing

The child is at its core, like a caterpillar
eating its way, to chrysalis, to metamorphosis

The child has both a mother and a father, and
some are language animals, some are not

The logic of the child is primal scream
pitted against the logic of sense, the logic of geometry

Call them prose poems, or shorts, or vignettes, they probe delicately and tenaciously
they problematize
ambiguities
the nature of a black square and its place in art history
the nature of a black hole in physics
and how two such holes may coexist in relative
harmony
the nature of love and its phases
the nature of fear, and Schwellenangst

An Orange, A Syllable inquires
sketches a scene
takes an example, tells a story
takes a counter-example, tells another
and in a series of moves that may resemble
a game of Go, keeps the reader
rapt until
the end

[Jessi · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I cannot blame the child for choosing efficiency. The verb slipping into the past with the smallest addition of sounds, consistent and predictable. I never correct her. Write. Writed. Why must the grammar strengthen if it already works? It’s a weak verb, so it’s correct, I over you say. Love. Loved.”

[Riley (runtobooks) · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[crista]

Sea-formed words foam forth and settle between us.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

see my review in issue 33 of the Temz Review