As Slow As Possible

by Kit Fan

Kit Fan's As Slow As Possible is a book of changes, of unlikely bridges between far-flung places and times, a collection of shape-shifting, trans-migrant poems that travel across geographies and time zones. There are poems about the slow life of trees which establish links across time and space, about environmental catastrophe, art in war zones, artworks that travel across time, all of them reflecting on mortality and survival. Divided into three parts, the book weaves back and forwards between East and West, past and present, art and memory, pivoting around a central sequence called 'Genesis', an uncanny re-telling of Chinese creation myths in the language of the Authorised Version. The first part of the book is a brilliantly chromatic travelogue, while the collection ends with a more grounded sequence, 'Twelve Months', focusing on a kind of diurnal poetic house-keeping, based on the poet's migrant life in Yorkshire.

Genres: Poetry

86 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2018

About the author

Kit Fan is a novelist, poet and critic. His first novel Diamond Hill (2021) was published with critical acclaim. Goodbye Chinatown (2026) is his second novel. His third poetry collection, The Ink Cloud Reader (2023), was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and Forward Prize. He was shortlisted twice for the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize, and was a winner of the Hong Kong University International Poetry Prize, Northern Writers Awards for Poetry and Fiction, Times/Stephen Spender Poetry Translation Prize and POETRY’s Editors Prize for Reviewing. He has written for the Guardian, Times Literary Supplement and Telegraph. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Vice-Chair of Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS), Co-Chair of the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA), and a Trustee of New Writing North. He was born and educated in Hong Kong and now lives in the UK.

Reviews

[Catherine Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this collection of poems, they are so rich in language and imagery. I first discovered Kit Fan through his first novel so I am now enjoying reading his earlier works of poetry.

[Ellie Kidger · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was both a surreal and honest collection. Fan looks at nation, language, travel, religion, myth, story, and much more in a way that feels ordered yet random. My favourite section is the Twelve Months part, where layered poetry appears in a way I've only ever seen before in the work of Susan Howe (The Midnight).

[S P · Rating 3 out of 5]

White on White

As each substance of a nothing
has twenty shadows, this fog
on cloud on snow is no less
than a blind spot in an absent
mind
crossing
out a figure
on an empty field no more
than one decimal place away, a
substance of a thing that has no
shadow but a yearlong full stop
rounding on and off December. (74)