Box Kite ― Prose Poems

A piece of paper with writing on it is flat, but when what is written on that paper fills the mind of a reader, it takes off into the wind like a box kite on a windy day,” writes Baziju the shared voice of poets Roo Borson and Kim Maltman. This exquisite, collaboratively written sequence of prose poems, unfolding through rich, delicate imagery, journeys through streets and gardens, houses and temples, cities and countryside, Canada and China. It is a meditation on the way we travel between places and between times, and how words and ideas travel between languages.

Baziju explores the literature of China, from centuries past to the present, exploring, at the same time, the meaning of hope and of home: childhood homes, the homes we grow into, and the homes in our minds. In Lu Xun’s classic story My Old Home,” the hero returns from a distant city to the home he left two decades earlier. Hope, he ponders, is just like the roads of the earth. . . . [T]o begin with the earth has no roads, but where many people pass, there a road is made.”

These sensual, deeply personal prose poems ponder change, loss, friendship, and belonging. In a life in which every detail has significance, the smallest observation grows, and spreads like the branches of wisteria.

Roo Borson is the author of ten books of poetry, including Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida, which won the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. She has also been involved in a number of collaborative projects, including Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei, by Pain Not Bread (Roo Borson, Kim Maltman, Andy Patton). Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, such asTwentieth Century Poetry and Poetics, the Harbrace Anthology of Poetry, and theNorton Introduction to Literature. Roo Borson lives in Toronto with poet and collaborator Kim Maltman.


Kim Maltman is a poet and physicist. He currently teaches in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, York University, and does research in theoretical particle physics. He has published six collections of poetry and he is the author of the collaborative work of poetry, Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei by Pain Not Bread (Roo Borson, Kim Maltman, Andy Patton). He lives in Toronto with poet and collaborator Roo Borson.