The image-work alone would justify getting your copy of The Sacred Heart Motel, Grace Kwan’s debut full-length poetry collection. I say “image-work,” but multiple senses show up on almost every page, as in the opening of “GLUE TRAP”:

The Sacred Heart Motel
Grace Kwan

Metonymy Press
$18.95
paper
104pp
9781998898169

My heart looks like the old yellow house where thin, mouse-bitten

walls separated our part of the basement from another

Chinese family. We could hear their daughter practice tongue

twisters, they could hear my mother scream when I went too far […]

These line breaks are masterful, splitting the thin walls and twisted tongues immigrants know so well. Indeed, the book’s dedication is “For migrants & visitors.” Yet, these are not just visitors to a country, but also to one’s heart. The table of contents, dubbed “directory,” maps seven different sections as if they were chambers – a term applicable to hearts and motels.

One of the sheer brilliances of Kwan’s book is turning migration into a love poem and love into a migration. Don’t even try to separate the political from the personal; there are too many transient rooms in the heart, unregistered hearts in any given room. And, of course, there’s the border – of desire, home, identity – where all the action happens: “the convergence of lives, motivations / riding shotgun,” as Kwan puts it, or rather wrenches it from our very hearts.mRb