Parade of Storms

Evelyn Lau is the Vancouver author of fifteen books, including ten volumes of poetry. Her first book, Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid (HarperCollins, 1989) was published when she was eighteen; it was made into a CBC movie starring Sandra Oh in her first major role. Evelyn’s short stories, essays, and novel have been translated into a dozen languages. Her poetry has received the Milton Acorn Award, the Pat Lowther Award, a National Magazine Award, and nominations for the BC Book Prize and the Governor General’s Award. Her poems have been chosen for inclusion in both the Best Canadian Poetry and Best American Poetry anthologies. From 2011-2014, Evelyn served as Poet Laureate for the City of Vancouver. Her previous collection is Cactus Gardens (Anvil, 2022), which was included in CBC’s Top 20 Poetry Books of 2022, shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Award, and received the Fred Cogswell Award. Parade of Storms is her tenth collection of poetry.

Shortlisted for the Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize“Each poem in this collection is meticulously infused with vivid details that immerse the reader, evoking the sensation of accompanying Lau as she navigates her experiences firsthand. Her ability to render weather as an intimate presence, rather than a detached, reportable event, adds a deeply personal dimension to her work.” (Room Magazine)“… Evelyn Lau goes to a place deep within herself in Parade of Storms that can view Vancouver’s tent cities and found needles, the container ship stacked 'like a copper fort bricked against sky', the floods, the hospices, the wildfires, the Chinese lanterns, the motel lobby signs, the young man’s 'come-on in an elevator, the skies the colour of a peach Bellini, and make it all meaningful without offering any easy answers. It is a complex poetic vision designed for a complex world.” (The Woodlot)“… Maybe the angels have no ears, but I certainly hear the clarity of Evelyn Lau’s arresting voice in Parade of Storms asking if the words, the words we carefully write, are worth more than the pound of flesh every honest poem or hard-won book takes from us. Lau doesn’t offer any easy answers, but the poems in this collection are tightly controlled, the images exacting, and they precariously balance the poet’s life experiences against the backdrop of ecological and human disasters we all face, which makes me able to write here that Lau’s experiences have given her the humility and the awe and the precision true poetry requires. …” (The Woodlot)"Throughout this collection, Lau (Cactus Gardens) writes from a variety of speakers’ voices about the debris of our messy human experience: the relationships, the griefs, the final weeks of someone’s life, and the struggle to make sense of things, as well as the actual litter of our living in this world—the plastics, the Styrofoam, and the dumpster garbage. Lau’s Parade of Storms is mature, muscular writing, with a layered complexity that draws the reader in." (The BC Review)