Iron Goddess of Mercy is a work of fierce, mad genius. Composing with equal parts chaos and precise form, Larissa Lai weaves the English language, the love letter and the haibun, historic violence and contemporary geopolitics, pop culture references, unrelenting rage and wicked humour into a polyphonic storm of meaning and emotion, like an ancient sorcerer bending the elements with many arms. With seemingly effortless virtuosity, the author spins us through a kaleidoscopic view of how empire building, occupation and revolution shape the individual and collective soul. No poetry lover, activist, historian or spiritual seeker could possibly fail to fall to their knees before Lai's Iron Goddess. Take heed, readers. These are the words of a master. -Kai Cheng Thom, author of a place called No Homeland

Dear Reader, I don't think I've ever experienced the intensity of an epistolary 'voice' performed with such impact as this Iron Goddess jamming through the syllables of an explosive imagination, then landing, simply, on a haiku. Larissa Lai's writing in this book is a phenomenal instance of improvisation that attracts and challenges our readerly dexterity. Dear Reader, Dear deer in the headlights, Dear 'people of the on/ off switch' - Stop, Look, and Listen. -Fred Wah, author of Music at the Heart of Thinking

Lai allows a tumble of history to seethe through Iron Goddess of Mercy. The high energy of her playful, cutting prose poetry is counter-posed with restful, concluding lyrics, with the two becoming one in a short sequence of visual poetry at book's end. A full banquet of poetic synthesis, serving up 'the long now' and 'the wide I' - a very satisfying poetry collection. -Joanne Arnott, author of Halfling Spring

Where does thinking go? We worry about the island of plastic growing in the Pacific Ocean, but what about the cyclone of thoughts that gather in our collective third eye? In Iron Goddess of Mercy, Larissa Lai is breaking her way through language pileups, hooking syllables onto syntax, looping modernity over history over time. What doesn't hang us we might weave into a haibun, that most magical of forms that allows all the sprawl of prose and all the precision of the haiku. 'What if, in spite of everything forgotten, the whole fabric remains swimming or stitching in fish form?' This is a tale of renewal: in the future we will all need to carry much, much more, and we really need to make light of it. -Sina Queyras, author of My Ariel

Iron Goddess of Mercy confronts a nightmarish inventory of the costs of human desire and ambition. Yet Lai's 'poethic' vision thrives by a poetry of grand imagination and sonic depth. Hidden scenes of unjust histories are spun out from modern life's random narratives of fanfare toward the stabilizing richness of epiphany. Here is mourning and celebration as Lai deals hard-won blows to the limiting strictness of reason. Here we emerge with better names for common things in their hypnotic globe of urgent transformation. -Canisia Lubrin, author of The Dyzgraphxst and Voodoo Hypothesis

Lai's bold technique of addressing and re-addressing the big legacies of the twenty first century points to the kind of work it takes to stay alive and conscious ... Through it all, she uses the slippages of syntax and sound to highlight the inadequacy and power of speech, the saying with unsaying, to speak truth to power about the load-bearing pressures on a body. Listen to the Iron Goddess: she knows. -Arc Poetry

Iron Goddess of Mercy is magic and revelation ... a masterful long poem that spins in and out of chaos and order.

-Quill and Quire

Lai charges through a wide range of subjects, including Asian stereotypes ("when does my slant/signal untrustworthy?"), capitalism ("glorifying blonds and bonds/in markets and mansions") and her family ties to Hong Kong and "the gashes of the past." The result is both polemical and wildly inventive. -Toronto Star

Dear reader, I'm always impressed by the power of Lai's imagination to dislocate us from reality in order to reattach us more meaningfully. Neither her worlds nor her words behave as they should. She liberates everything she touches to recombine with whatever it pleases. Billie Jean King can live next to Michael Jackson's 'Billie Jean.' Strands of Indigenous, Black, and Asian movements merge into recombinant DNA. Dear reader, in this intense, sustained long poem, Lai finds a form for everything we don't want to talk about -"smile now I don't understand why you're so upset" - but must. -Ian Williams, author of Personals