Suyin Du Bois is a poet of mixed Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian heritage, living in London with her South African husband. Her poems have been published in Propel, Iamb, Stanzas, Bi+ Lines: An Anthology of Contemporary Bi+ Poets (Fourteen Publishing, 2023) and Malaysian Places and Spaces (Maya Press, 2024), amongst others. She is a member of the Southbank Centre’s New Poets Collective 2024/25. When not obsessing over word choice, Suyin spends her time building a profit-with-purpose start-up that seeks to ensure 24/7 access to nutritious, affordable food for NHS hospital staff. Eating Air is her debut pamphlet.
About Eating Air, by Suyin Du Bois
Steam rises from bowls of noodle soup, tender steaks are seared in butter, sand-roasted chestnuts are shared from a paper bag. Eating Air – the debut pamphlet from Suyin Du Bois – is a mouth-watering collection of poems about food, belonging and connection.
Charting a journey across cuisines and continents, these poems carve into the author’s dual Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian heritage and food's enduring role in our cultural, familial and personal histories.
From the low stools of Penang’s kopitiams to the bright lights of London's Chinatown, Eating Air is a love song to food and a poignant catalogue of its profound capacity to serve up memory, language, and longing.
You can read more about Eating Air on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection.
From Eating Air
Ode to Kaya
Egg jam first on my young tongue: palm sugar
sweet, coconut milk rich. Thick layers on charred
toast, salted butter cubes between, melting in Penang
sweat. My Goh Ee Poh stood for hours stirring you
in that double boiled heat. Exports to be swaddled,
twisted into pink and green plastic bags, nestled
amongst swimming costumes and sundresses – rituals
to ward off mid-air leaks in the 14 hours from one home
to the other. Back in England your layers thinned,
our knives more sparing after each spread.
After Goh Ee Poh grew too frail, aunties and uncles
gifted us store-bought surrogates. You were labelled Kaya.
Our cupboards filled with your empties, aides-mémoire
of indulgence repurposed to house fragrant rice, Chinese
mushrooms, our longing for Nyonya flavours.
By the time pandan leaves arrive in Chinatown, I am grown
up, have my own kitchen where I can stand for hours.
Goh Ee Poh has long since condensed
into photographs, so I sweeten my never-asked
regret, trace down someone else’s heirloom recipe.
You are needy, threaten lumps, failure, but I stir and stir
like her until my spoon draws the right depths of lineage.
I lift a heap of you into my mouth, tongue
your clotted grainy sweetness.
Cut Scenes
Dad fusses with his leather school bag / before sitting down to breakfast / by the coal-fired stove / in a 1920s maison de ville I’ve visited from the pavement / my grand-père / who I know from Agfa Billy snaps of walking holidays in the Ardennes / Sunday best studio portraits / has sizzled him a small steak / in a lump of butter / crisped at the edges / deep juicy red in the centre / fried bread on the side / the best way he knows / to sustain his son / on the bundled walk across the tram tracks to school / to protect him / against its respected priests / the wooden blackboard erasers they aim at boys’ heads
Dad orders steak in a restaurant / blue / walking to the table / by the excuse-me method of cooking / one part joke / three parts recipe / waiters don’t always get it / my held breath / a kind of grace / I watch for his knife to deliver / deep juicy red / not pink / worse grey / how else / can he see his father again / only when I know / it won’t be sent back / I slice my own / reveal / the fibres that make us
No comments:
Post a Comment