Baby Book

2023 Governor General's Award for Poetry Finalist

"God is personal," the astrologer said. Terrifying and also personal, like a baby.

Direct and humorous, Baby Book stacks story upon story to explore how beliefs are first formed. From a family vacation on a discount bus tour to a cosmogony based on cheese, these poems accumulate around principles of contingency and revelation. Amy Ching-Yan Lam describes the vivid tactility of growth and death - how everything is constantly, painfully remade - offering a vision against the stuck narratives of property and inheritance. Power is located in the senses, in wind: multiple and restless.