Review of Bowling Pin Fire

Bowling Pin Fire

"Let it all hover in the air like fireflies" opens the poem "Speaking Your Poetry Aloud": "see them pirouette, rearranging/their constellations, even if you have never/known fireflies and this analogy is misplaced." Quan's writing has been described as "conversational simplicity blossoming smoothly into intricate, evocative imagery."


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Bowling Pin Fire

In an era of HIV/AIDS the fragility of life is omnipresent alongside the blossoming and wilt of relationships. For a man of Chinese heritage to be candid about his homosexuality and to describe that passion so tenderly and honestly is reason alone to read Andy Quan, but he is in his own right, categories aside, a gifted writer and one able to put observation into poetry as easily as conversation whilst pricking conscience and memory simultaneously.


Northern Poetry Review

Bowling Pin Fire

Bowling Pin Fire is a fine example of how personal family stories and childhood memories become political when they are articulated in such a way that readers can't help but be affected… Quan articulates sentiments that we would all do well to hear. Namely, that maturity is sexy. Self-awareness is hot. Comfort in one's own life and personal relationships and in one's own self is something that happens over time—with considerable struggle—and it marks our bodies in one way or another.


Xtra West

Bowling Pin Fire

Quan writes with an enticing style whose conversational simplicity blossoms smoothly into intricate, evocative imagery; the result is poetry both musical and highly visual.


Lambda Book Report

Bowling Pin Fire

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 coer 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 incudes a birth announcement for a Jeremiah Quan, born December 15th, 2002), even confessional. Andy Quan cooly opens up his life for the reader in a book about the necessary pleasures of self-reflection.


— Quentin Mills-Fenn Uptown Magazine

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