Book review: Kit Fan’s The Ink Cloud Reader is poetry that lends lyrical heft to violence

The Ink Cloud Reader
By Kit Fan

Poetry/Carcanet/96 pages/$32.29/Amazon (amzn.to/3PbUF93)
4 out of 5 stars

“What I need now, to change / the half-course of my life,” writes poet Kit Fan, “is to be struck by lightning / and survive it, like Hokusai.”

Like the celebrated artist of the Edo period, who is said to have adopted 30 pseudonyms and moved houses 93 times over his life, the Hong Kong-born, Britain-based author of The Ink Cloud Reader is a consummate shape-shifter.

If one pays attention to the undertones of violence in the book, one might consider Fan’s words to arise from the aftermath of life-altering events.

From an unnamed illness to referencing Hong Kong’s decade of protest and crackdown to depictions of queer sexuality, he transforms everyday loss and violence into something sublime.

Often, he discerns violence through a disturbing but gentle surrealism, seemingly at odds with the silken properties of clouds: “While others sit on the windowsill / cloud-watching, I give birth / to geraniums in May in the chill.”

Recalling his birth from his mother’s perspective, Fan’s speaker says, “I saw what she saw: / a cloud of messy flesh waiting at the gate / redder than ink”, before the image morphs into “clouds / hiding the teargas and bullets”.

At other times, wearing the burden of foreignness in another land, he writes that “sometimes you look like Yayoi Kusama’s / infinite polka dots and sometimes like / Kadinsky’s unfinished circles in boxes / or Seurat’s pointillistic calm stolen from / the grey smoke and chimneys on the horizon”.

Like the photographs Fan uses to splice the book’s sections – such as those of solid marble from the Santa Maria dei Miracoli church in Venice, deceptively fluid-looking on the page – the undertow of violence that his poems generate can give off a contradictory tenderness.

His poems are most potent when he blends the sculptural with the lyrical, melding a penchant for visualising violence with a fond, if painful, affection for his subject.

This is exemplified in After The Quake, a two-part poem juxtaposing “black-haired clouds” looming over an 1855 earthquake in Edo Japan with another in 2016, where the speaker and his lover shake off worry and “lay in bed like stemless sunflowers”.

The collection’s rare weak points are the poems which are either excessively dense (Gluck, a poem in the form of a playscript) or saccharinely sweet (Hong Kong And The Echo).

Fan unites violence, small and large, to shape and dispel an unsettling present. Here, he has forged a brick of lyrical heft to build, as he puts it, “a voice, a temporary abode”.

If you like this, read: Fleche by Mary Jean Chan (Faber & Faber, 2019, $23.54, Amazon, go to

amzn.to/3NbD5iP

), for a take on the Hong Kong experience in Britain that also investigates queerness and notions of home.