By Grace
Be Water is a meditation on change—on what happens when life pulls you from the city’s constant current into quieter, slower waters. In these poems, water becomes both vessel and mirror, reflecting how we adapt, how we hold grief and joy at once, and how we learn, finally, to flow.
Through its emotional clarity, wry humour, and precise lyricism, Be Water is an exploration of identity that is both culturally grounded and universally resonant. It is a collection about becoming and unbecoming, about the histories we carry and the futures we dare to imagine, and about learning to move through the world—like water—with strength, grace, and unstoppable persistence.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR BE WATER
“Grace’s poems flow through memories and family prohibitions like water around rocks in a stream, sometimes rippling with absence, sometimes travelling to places of refuge and hard-won acceptance. Grace weaves a tapestry that is parts wry, parts sardonic while remaining dedicatedly reflective, intertwining human nature with the larger cosmos, listening to the glittering sigh of the earth all around us. Wrestling with the pervasive legacy of colonization and racism, yet the wish to embody peace, protest, and dignity persists in these poems. Be Water delights in subversion and subverts through delight in queer joy.”
— Lydia Kwa, author of from time to new
“We can’t know what our future holds once we’ve made radical decisions to leave familiar homes and family, but Grace brings us found family, queer joy, and a Nils Frahm record. The poems in Be Water are generous and openhearted, and resist the notion that certainty is the only way to bring comfort and security. The world seems to move at a lightning-fast pace, but spending time with Grace’s poetry brought the feeling of a warm sun on a chilly winter day, a desire to open up my arms to a downpour.”
— Manahil Bandukwala, author of Heliotropia
Grace is a Hong Kong-born settler, recovering marketer, and poet based in Ontario on the traditional and Treaty territory of the Anishinabek people. Her debut collection, The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak, was a Lambda Award finalist. Find her online at @thrillandgrace.
