The Ink Cloud Reader

Reviews / Votes

'In The Ink Cloud Reader, Kit Fan's moving, wise and fluid poems grapple with the forces 'converting loss to some form / of chaos'. The book's vivid portrait of a marriage, quickened by sickness and the threat of separation, presents love as a play of shadow and light. Fan gets stranger, more daring, with each successive book: he is an essential poet, and one I will always return to.'

Sarah Howe 'The compressed narratives in The Ink Cloud Reader demonstrate both lyric intensity and a remarkable dramatic reach. In this impressive third collection, Kit Fan's restless, explorative, compositional impulse is evident from first to last [...] The poems in this collection - personal, political, edgy, sometimes provocative - have a unifying voice both intriguing and wholly original.'

David Harsent 'Kit Fan's poems are a kind of lyric vortex: imagistic fictions that wrap themselves around a hard, lyrical, personal centre, something like the complexity of a seed. This collection holds at its core the tension of what to say and how to say it, gloriously in celebration of ambivalence, and questioning.' ?

Rachael Allen 'A moving, lyrically potent collection charting the interconnected impacts of political and personal fracture... Here the losses of place and the losses of the body tumble into each other, creating a painfully raw yet deeply affecting poetic universe.'

Rebecca Tamas, The Guardian '...an impressively skilful, dazzlingly inventive and sometimes moving book that speaks strongly to the confusions of contemporary life.'

Edmund Prestwich, The North