Winnipeg publisher Signature Editions seems to be cornering the market on poetry by West Coast gay men: Michael V. Smith (What You Can't Have Here), Sean Horlor (Made Beautiful By Use), and now Andy Quan (born in Vancouver, now living in Sydney, Australia).

Quan's book, Bowling Pin Fire, has poems about falling in love with Joni Mitchell and falling in love to Joni Mitchell, as well as poems about experiencing ketamine and ecstasy. As the blurb on the back cover notes, many of the poems have to do with firsts, such as a first dance with another man (to a Joni song no less). The last poem in the collection tells of the joy in a Chinese-Canadian family on the arrival of the first grandson.

These poems are personal, autobiographical (the book includes a birth announcement for a Jeremiah Quan, born December 15th, 2002), even confessional. Andy Quan coolly opens up his life for the reader in a book about the necessary pleasures of self-reflection.

. . .

Cover blurbs are troublesome things. I almost didn't read Radiance (Random House) by Shaena Lambert because of a comparison to "the master, Alice Munro."

Now the book is out in paperback and I've read it - and I'm glad I did. The time is 1952. Keiko Kitigawa is a Hiroshima Maiden, brought to New York for surgery to repair the damage - the physical damage, at least - caused by the nuclear bomb. She comes to the United States as a guest of a leftist-but-not-too-left, charity devoted to fighting the further development of atomic weapons. The Hiroshima Project plans that, after her surgery, Keiko will serve as its cover girl.

But Keiko might have her own agenda and only her home-stay mother is aware of the girl's depths. Radiance is an elegantly written book that looks at a country coming to terms with its contradictory narratives of destruction and assistance.

Plus, there's a contemporary echo. I was just at the CNN website and noticed a follow-up on the coverage of a young Iraqi boy seriously burnt in an attack in Baghdad last year. The five-year-old came to the United States with his family for a series of operations ("Youssif rubs face with hands, says 'no hurt,'" the headline reads). Youssif is now going to school in Woodland Hills, Calif. No doubt this is intended as a feel-good story.