A poetry chapbook by Kaitlin Rees
Translation by Nhã Thuyên

In her poems, Kaitlin Rees often performs relationships with enough distance to observe and watch herself, observe and watch the world, while also watching poetry. Kaitlin questions the (im)mobility of language, putting herself in various encounters within different lands of languages, while moving vaguely between inner and outer spaces, here and there, motherland and foreign country, the world and the self, the abstract and the concrete, the attached and the detached, the depth and the surface, and so on. And still seeming to wonder at the (un)necessity of reaching depth: where can we find it? Or hasn't the surface depth itself?

I imagine Kaitlin is, in her way, exploring other selves in new contexts, and maybe a fresh inner field of her soul is to be sooner or later plowed.  

Each time my body touches the body of a stranger, I suddenly become a stranger to myself, sometimes as if there’s a fresh rising love, and a story that wants to be told. But always, in love, the lover with the opened heart has to face her vulnerability, many times, and maybe the heart will never be peaceful again.

I wish I could hear more secret, more different, more intimate voices in Kaitlin’s poems. It would be closer to her, and to me as a reader if there was the chance to close our eyes and touch and feel and listen to each other’s voices. The sound of the writer would echo the sound of the reader and vice versa.

Writing, does it come from the outside in or from the inside world pushing out? I don’t think binary words can comfort me anymore. I do not know where my writing will lead me and for what… To connect the self to the world or just connect the self to another self? Anyway, if I cannot avoid myself and poetry, I cannot help bearing my vulnerable heart.

-Nhã Thuyên-