Fiona Sze-Lorrain was born in Singapore, and grew up in a hybrid of cultures. After receiving a British education,she moved to the States, and graduated from Columbia University and New York University before pursuing a Ph.D.at Paris IV-Sorbonne. A zheng concertist, she has performed worldwide. One of the editors at Cerise Press, she writes and translates in English, French and Chinese. She lives in both New York City and Paris, France.

Books by Fiona Sze-Lorrain:

Fiona Sze-Lorrain's Website.

About Water the Moon:

"How delicate and mysterious, empathetically open and spiritually anchored... they are. Searching to know and to feel intimately... These things I admire so much. The poems, when I think about them — like remembering a landscape — seem full of clarity, like the full moon. If the moon had bones, maybe they would be these poems..."
—Tess Gallagher

"In Fiona Sze-Lorrain's poems, an intelligent tenderness pivots back and forth between her listeners and all her varied homelands. As we hear her quiet, allusive syntax, we seem to partake of an extraordinary renewal, as she reviews, sees anew her generative sources. She manages to turns her experiences into ours, with a generosity few lyric poets seem to have — the poems as an open door. As I read the vivid detail of her poems, I seem to be remembering them. She shuns the exotic and the pretty, and instead invokes the Asia she comes from by making her Europe just as precise, exactingly demanding, accurate — language and trope, our flowers, the ever-lyrical mind of language we all come from. 'Her eyes tell a story/different from their tears —' it is that sort of richness that makes her poems stay in mind."
—Robert Kelly

"A kind of 'Ponts des Arts,' these cosmopolitan and compassionate poems span worlds, are rich in startling images, in appetites sharpened by a knowledge of hunger, abstractions perceived as objects moving in a changing light. Water the Moon marks the welcome arrival to our poetry of a cross-culturally complex protean and nuanced new voice — a stunning debut."
—Eleanor Wilner