Baby Book

2023 Governor General's Award for Poetry Finalist* Longlisted 2024 Gerald Lampert Award* Longlist 2025 Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry*

"God is personal," the astrologer said. Terrifying and also personal, like a baby.

Direct and humorous, Baby Book stacks story upon story to explore how beliefs are first formed. From a family vacation on a discount bus tour to a cosmogony based on cheese, these poems accumulate around principles of contingency and revelation. Amy Ching-Yan Lam describes the vivid tactility of growth and death -- how everything is constantly, painfully remade -- offering a vision against the stuck narratives of property and inheritance. Power is located in the senses, in wind: multiple and restless.