Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Ginger Scallion Fish” by Christine Wu, from Familial Hungers (Brick Books 2025), shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award.

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Ginger Scallion Fish

By Christine Wu

From Familial Hungers

Smothered under a tinder

of ginger and scallion lies a whole

steamed fish. Under the new moon, a glint

of silver scale, sesame, soy, salt tears.

Here, the new year is more

than rice and noodles, it is also the gleam

of a cooked eyeball waiting to be plucked out

from that whole steamed yu, a stubborn stare

returned, knowing its circumstance, still

hoping for an auspicious year, still wanting

to be wanted, giving up my flesh

and picking my bones clean.

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Copyright © Christine Wu

From Familial Hungers (Brick Books 2025), shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award.

Originally from the West Coast, Christine Wu is a Chinese-Canadian poet who now lives on the East Coast, in Mi’kma’ki, on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq people. She was the winner of the 2023 RBC PEN Canada New Voices Award and a finalist for the 2022 RBC Writers’ Trust Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Her debut poetry collection, Familial Hungers, was published by Brick Books in 2025 and is currently shortlisted for the J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award.

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