The Sacred Heart Motel is devastating and gorgeous. Kwan skillfully presents a literal image and makes a connection to an emotion or feeling. This is a successful way to metaphorically make an abstract concrete for readers. For example, in “Glue Trap” they provide a chilling and sensory description of a mouse caught in a glue trap, even describing its chirps as the glue slips, and then attaches this image to love and grief. Or in “Heat Wave” they offer a collection of accumulated images of heat: thirst, bright sunshine, and ice melting, which they overlay with complicated feelings about a pregnancy.

In “IV, Ocean,” the fourth part of a seven-part long poem threaded throughout the book, Kwan turns the “blue canvas of a roof” into an ocean, the lovers in the poems becoming seafarers and pirates until the roof becomes solid again. The seven-parts of the poem move from love and honour to time and the ride, veering from traditional vows to love, honour, cherish (and obey?). After reading it in its existing placement, I read it separately to give me the feeling of one long poem seeded throughout the book with glimpses of magic and moments of stillness. Both readings are effective, but I do love the way this poem is scattered throughout the book, returning again and again.

There’s a versatility in Kwan’s powers of description. They can portray the macabre and visceral, such as the “frisson of darkened / marrow and plasma.” Or the description of a knife sliding through an avocado that “missed the pit and sliced her / finger, / its brusque nerve” in “Rationale.” They can offer childlike descriptions too, such as the description of rabbits in “Clover:”

Downy grey things with dumpling bums
and periscope ears.

Kwan finds wonder in ordinary circumstances: wolves sing on the television in an empty
suite in “The Moonlight Suite:”

as if singing

to the night or maybe eating it whole.

A mother dances on frosted steps while waiting with her daughter to take a bus in “Ballet Flats.” A mannequin is “shaped like / half a child with bottle-blond hair” on a balcony in “Kitchen: Back Exit.”

There are many holy fuck moments in the collection. In “I Love,” the first of the seven-part long poem throughout the book, it is the repetition of “drop” and how it transforms throughout the poem, both conceptually and syntactically from “dewdrops” to the verb “drop” to a “bead of /starlight” to a “swan-drop” to the return to the verb and the end-line repetition: drop, drops, dropped, like a conjugation.

Some poems and their unique expressions and imagery continue to haunt me. There are the ghosts in “Room 209” and the green wallpaper that anxiously lingers, the pregnant woman in “Heat Wave,” the speaker’s relationship with their instrument in “Intermission,” the backwards time smoke/ash/car/vanishing images in “Lucky Strike,” and the exquisite sensuality in “Yellow Light.”

After reading, I am left with a sense of grief, but I am not certain why. The Sacred Heart Motel makes me think of Amber Dawn’s last novel, Sodom Road Exit (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018) with its abandoned amusement park, old motels and ghosts. Kwan’s collection conjures images and memories of the old Toronto motels by the lakeshore, pink and green neon signs in the fog: what we regret, who and what we long for, what we miss and how we survive.