Poetic Edge Publishers

Praise for Self-Portrait as a Banana

These are fresh, invigorating poems about queer life and desire, about the migrant experience. We hear the body’s memory of home and touch, a hand on the poet’s thigh or back, being threatened “by a drugged-up man”, being ostracised on a Nottingham tram, making the speaker “feel/ my skin, my body. my difference.” A lovely unrhymed sonnet ends “How shall my body remember you?” The honesty, wit and compassionate lyricism in Hongwei Bao’s voice is persuasive and appealing.

~ Robert Hamberger, author of Nude Against A Rock

This collection, including Hongwei Bao’s earlier tender and punchy pamphlet, deepens his exploration of roots and heritage while encapsulating current queer experience. His poems move between connection and dislocation, community and isolation. Hongwei Bao captures the tension between longing for the ‘sweet and tangy’ taste of home to the excitement of new horizons, from drinking tea with an old friend to getting your first nose piercing. He weaves in and out of local landmarks, with music, news, gossip, beer and chips while remembering a homeland left behind. From fear and hiding to uncompromising boldness, with quirky humour or wistfulness, he explores all aspects of love whether family, fleeting encounter or partnership. A distinctive and important new voice.

~ Maria Jastrzębska, author of Small Odysseys

Self-Portrait is like a pot noodle. Reminiscent of childhood days, grey adulthood, and a mixture of flavours so familiar. Bao asks, ‘why do I have to decide at all’ and this ambiguity, carefulness, and precarity of being queer Chinese diaspora echoes throughout every poem in this collection. In this collection, the author is both home and away, surrounded by familiarity and an alien, and filled with a warmth like a soup made by a loved one at the end of a cold day. This book turns everyday life into a saga about lotus ponds, fish and chips, and family.

~ Kika Man 文詠玲, author of Let the Mourning Come

Hongwei Bao writes moving poems that engage with doubleness and dislocation. They quest through intimate contradictions (‘& why is there a summer / & why do I have to decide at all’) in search of places where ‘happiness is stretched thin and long’. From the gloriously punchy title poem to the stirring quiet of ‘The Owl’ they invite the reader to contemplate and connect.

~ John McCullough, author of Panic Response

In his second full-length collection, Hongwei Bao dwells on his experiences of migration and homecoming, using his own position in the queer East Asian diaspora to illustrate broader social themes. In poems of resilient optimism, he shows how one can counter prejudice by creating one’s own versions of home and belonging, within communities of one’s own choosing and devising. For all the breadth of their resonance, across a span of both time and space, the poems concentrate on the meaningful details of everyday life at a local level, where familiarity overcomes estrangement.

~ Gregory Woods, author of Records of an Incitement to Silence