Maps of Our Bodies & the Borders We Have Agreed Upon. Montréal: Cumulus Press, 2005.

(from back cover) Maps of Our Bodies draws on themes of travel, location/dislocation, and that old workhorse, love. These poems and prose poems are a series of maps and meditations on the act of traversing space, both physically and emotionally; together, they sketch out a narrative arc about the course of a relationship, from its intense and sleepless beginnings to the negotiations of boundaries and space, to separation over long distances and a solitary road trip across the huge expanse of land that is Canada.

The accompanying CD, Roadmaps, is a word/music collaboration between writer Taien Ng-Chan and musician Scott W. Gray of The Sally Fields. These thirteen songs explore a range of musical styles from traditional pop guitar and percussion to technological soundscape. Enhancing the CD are six videos, featuring a contribution by cartoonist/animator Joe Ollmann.

reviews

Shameless Magazine - July 2006

Beginning in a stuffy apartment, Taien Ng-Chan's book of poems soon bursts onto the open landscape like a flock of birds swooping out of the bushes. With the help of musician Scott W. Gray and cartoonist Joe Ollmann on the accompanying multimedia CD, Ng-Chan hypnotically roars eastward across Canada on a solo road trip. She perfectly captures the feeling of leaving everything you know but not being ready to arrive at a new place. Despite the movement of the car, time is suspended on her journey. Ng-Chan's measured voice leaves wide-open spaces between words, as do many of her poems on the page. This technique eloquently hints at a difficult relationship with someone, one that needs certain distances and detailed borders. The arty table of contents is drawn like a map, and each poem represents a place on the journey. Have you ever wanted to just keep on driving? Taien does. She empties tank after tank of gas, burning through every city and town on the Trans-Canada highway. Until, of course, she long passes her destination and reaches the ocean, where she has "nothing to do but turn back or fall in." The choice she makes reminds us that the most profound epiphanies always come when you work to make a place your home.

-Pike Wright

Fresh Tracks - May 2006
https://wfs.gc.cuny.edu/CFrost/www/FreshFeature.html

Taien Ng-Chan's first solo book/CD is as perfect in its own way as the buzzing, starlit clarity that comes over you in the early morning hours when you've been driving all night down a long Canadian highway. Her writing for the most part keeps things nice and simple, letting the pleasures of narrative and observation sink in. The narrative comes to us through loosely connected elliptical episodes, telling us, loosely, about a solo cross-country road trip and its echoes of a love affair (or affairs) in progress. Many of the familiar, mythic tropes of the road movie are evoked: the optimistic departures and anticlimactic arrivals, the flashing lines of the road at night, the comedy of the road-sign fauna, the narcolepsy, the jarring crash, and the urge to "just keep driving." I listened to the CD for the first time driving down the NY state thruway by myself, and I felt like I had entered a sort of video-game version of the writer's mind.

The entire production lives up to the crispness of Taien's words and delivery: Scott W. Gray's clever beats and soundscapes strike the right tone of slightly distracted urgency, slightly offbeat catchiness, like the improvised tunes you hum when the car radio's broken. More is in store if you happen to have a laptop in the car and can check out the six videos, including a great flash animation by cartoonist Joe Ollman in which the road-side deer somehow look like cervine versions of Joe himself, or at least his cartoon self. The design of the book, too, is perfectly conceived, with simple black and white photos of bits of the highway passing by. Taien, who did great editorial work with the Ribsauce book/CD, has got it all together here with a perfect showcase of her own multiple talents.

- Corey Frost

ribsauce: a CD/anthology of words by women - Anthology editor and contributor
(Montreal: Véhicule Press & Wired on Words 2001).

reviews

Montreal Hour - November 28, 2001

Editor Taien Ng-Chan has done an impressive job of selecting some of the finest writers around, regardless of gender...Almost every page in the book is a revelation, and I can't recommend it highly enough; suffice it to say that this is a collection that will be treasured by many.

Montreal Gazette - April 30, 2002

More than simply a feminist project, Ribsauce is an exploration of the region where sound, meaning and performance intersect. As these women demonstrate, literature is moving beyond poets at podiums and novel-reading in armchairs.