Bright Sorrow

the bright sorrow is always ringing, always ringing, and fading into forgetting. In his second book, Jonathan Chan presents poems written through the years of the pandemic and eruptions of war and strife. Each circles the notion of ‘bright sorrow’, a spiritual state characterised by a profound mingling of joy and grief. These poems look to repentance, to suffering, and to the contradiction of extremities, each glistening at their core. Jonathan Chan’s poems are distinctively musical, acutely observed, and existentially engaged at the deepest level. They are bracing to discover.