Miriam Wei Wei Lo (b. 1973)
CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
Written by Elizabeth Scott
Dated 31 Mar 2026
The beauty of Miriam Wei Wei Lo’s poetry lies in her poignant use of language that situates her identity while seeming to travel across borders. Like the confessional poetry of Sylvia Plath, Lo’s poetry comes from the most intimate recesses of her being. With her words, Lo lays herself bare and invites us into her world and the life she has led.
The child of a Malaysian Chinese father and an Anglo-Australian mother born in Canada, raised in Singapore, and now living in Australia, Lo began writing poetry to “figure out who she was, especially in the context of her mixed-race heritage and multiple migrations” (Who Comes Calling?). Over time, her writing became a spiritual vocation, “a way to share things, to give them to others”. These “things” that she shares manifest viscerally through her beautiful wordplay. Over the years, Lo has played an active role in the literary scene both in Singapore and at home in Australia. Her contributions to Singaporean journals such as PR&TA and the Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore, as well as several Australian journals such as the Sydney Review of Books and Rabbit, combined with her editorial projects such as Seagift that aim to bring Singaporean and Australian poets together, show her commitment to being a part of the literary scene in both countries. Most recently, her four-part poem “Return Flight” won the 2025 Tom Collins Poetry prize in Australia. Here, Lo talks about memories of her Malaysian father and his stories about his life in Sarawak and quotes Singaporean Australian poet Boey Kim Cheng in this poem, acknowledging their shared link to Singapore. Through her writing, Lo maintains this link to her life and heritage in Singapore and Malaysia while asserting a strong sense of her Australian identity as well.
In her collections, Against Certain Capture (2004), winner of the West Australian Premier’s Book Award for poetry, and Who Comes Calling? (2023), Lo marries both of her cultures to present a vivid picture of her girlhood in Singapore and experience of motherhood in Australia through interjections of phrases in Mandarin, fleeting memories of her classmates in Raffles Girls’ School and the flavours of her father’s Hakka cuisine. Her collections, published two decades apart, feel singular in focus. Through her poems, she interrogates her relationships with friends and family members, her life as a mother and reflections on spaces that she visits and inhabits as they intersect with her mixed heritage and, more recently, her religion.
Against Certain Capture is a slim volume uniquely structured in two distinct sections, each representing one of Lo’s grandmothers and serving as parallel chronologies of each woman’s life. In both narratives, her grandmothers begin their respective stories with flight. Her paternal grandmother Liang Yue Xian begins hers with the poem “Run” that sees her in the rubber plantations of Kuching where “every morning / that doesn’t / bring rain / will bring rubber”. Here, the metaphor of the “slow / white weeping / of trees” comes to represent Liang’s life of a slow, quiet melancholy that is represented in other poems in this section. The final lines of this poem see Lo’s voice from the future addressing her grandmother,
you have
two feet
so run.
The poem’s halting cadence mimics the rhythm of this symbolic run, which carries through the rest of the collection, underlining the migratory legacy of Lo’s heritage. Her maternal grandmother, Eva Sounness’ section, begins similarly with migration with “Leaving the Goldfields”. In her case, this move is one characterised by hesitance.
Eva sits on the train. She is memorising
the colour of Kalgoorlie dust. She is calling to mind
the names of her friends
These women’s parallel migrations run deeper than a mere chronological retelling of their stories. By setting out on their individual paths, the women travel towards the confluence that brings this merging of cultures through love.
Later, as Japanese forces invade during World War 2, the hardship of life in wartime Malaya is written into “No Pretty Words”. This poem further tells of Liang’s suffering, who struggles to raise children with no food in the house and a husband who gambles their money away. Lo writes,
There are no pretty words for hunger.
Only what thuds from the mouth,
flat and ugly,
like rice, fish,
sweet potato -
words to roll around her in her stomach
or burn in her throat
when her husband comes home
with nothing.
Like “Run”, Lo acknowledges the stoical tolerance of her grandmother in the face of adversity but her retelling is particularly impactful here as she likens Liang’s silence to the ugliness of hunger that she sustains herself on, ugly words that “roll around in her stomach” like “rice, fish, /sweet potato”, imbuing it with its own power.
“The Letter”, one of the later poems in this section, charts the moment Liang’s son, Lo’s father, begins his relationship with an Australian girl, Susan, who will become Lo’s mother. Here, Liang laments this relationship and fears that she will lose her son just as she has lost so much else in her life. She begs, “I love you, come home.” But in Lo’s hands, this lamentation is a silent one. The poem ends with the following lines:
But she cannot hold him, how quickly he slips from her gaze
to those words on the page
that are taking him away
to a place she has no name for.
Liang’s anxiety and longing for her son are countered in “Farmgirl Marries” which shows Sounness’ explosive response to her discovery of her daughter’s decision to marry Lo’s father. The poem reads in a series of Caps-Locked pseudo-headlines, adding to the poem’s shouting tone, with words that indicate a hostility that will not dissipate with marriage. Sounness declares “Over my dead body” and she “tries to make her see reason” by declaring that “It’s wrong to marry someone from a different race!”. Her husband Cliff refuses to attend the wedding amidst doors being slammed and crying, before she writes a “nasty letter” to Lo’s father. When the poem’s final line declares in all caps “FARMGIRL MARRIES CHINAMAN”, the reader feels a sense of victory for the young lovers’ rebellion in contrast to the pity felt for Liang’s sorrow, reflecting Lo’s wistful admiration for Yue Xian’s quiet strength and an awe-struck respect for Eva’s confidence.
Against Certain Capture is the first manifestation of Lo’s poetic homage to her origins as a person of mixed heritage, which she begins to contend with through the representation of her grandmothers’ lives. This recognition of her grandmothers’ resonance in her life continues to thread through her next book Who Comes Calling? (2023), published two decades later, but including work spanning the past thirty years. In her second collection, Lo’s poems feature the same deeply personal voice and autobiographical hallmarks of her confessional style, but include greater forays into experimentation with structure. Here, poems typical of the narrative and imagistic style in her first collection are interwoven with poems that combine verse and prose (“A Few Thoughts on Multiple Identity”), prose poems (“Searching for Words”), triptychs (“Three Love Poems”), haiku-esque fragments (“Prayer” and “Praise”), concrete poems (“Father, I Fling This Jasmine”) and a series of ekphrastic poems based on the digital drawings of Australian artist, Jenny Potts Barr (“Who Comes Calling”, “Siren”, “Decoration” and “Out From The Water”). These poems, through their varied styles, add a layer of imagination and playfulness to Lo’s reflections on motherhood, friendship and her relationships with family. In Who Comes Calling?, a religious undercurrent accompanies the presence of her grandmother to offer a view of the world that is intersected by Lo’s cultural hybridity and her Christian faith.
Who Comes Calling? opens with the aptly titled “Opening Australia” - an open-palmed greeting of a poem that welcomes us into Lo’s world. Here, she presents layers of memories from her visits to Australia as a small child, offering them one at a time as if counting them off her fingers. After the fifth, her palm held up, we find her unable to communicate this feeling of home to the “schoolgirls / dressed in pinafores” back in Singapore. She can only look at herself in the mirror through her eyes “shuttered by fingers”, observing herself at a remove. Lo’s continuous search for her identity in her youth and finding it inaccessible places her at a crossroads where she searches for a singular understanding of her origins. However, she finds herself split in the different directions her experiences have taken her –- an experience perhaps shared by other immigrants. She charts this in “What We See By’, written in response to Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet’s “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved” - a chronicle of her life beginning at her birth in snowy Canada, to her youth in the “Electri-City” of 1980s Singapore, and finally to Australia, where she spends her adult life from her University days to motherhood and beyond. She asks herself how she arrived at this point in her life as the poem approaches its end; if it is geography, age or the people she has left behind. She asks,
is it because I am half dead thinking of all my failures to love
all the people I’ve pushed away
including my mother in Singapore
her hair grey now her voice less certain
In these lines, as elsewhere, she maps her emotions spatially in her words, her use of caesura, enjambment and spacing adding an element of physicality to her description of how people are ‘pushed away’ in her search for home. Even as she considers this in her house “on top of a hill overlooking the ocean” in Fremantle, Australia, Lo acknowledges this as Walyalup on Noongar land and refers to it as a place where she “does not deserve to live”. Her deferential acknowledgement of the Aboriginal claim to the land signals her recognition of the displacement of Aboriginal Australians, but also points to her continued search for a true sense of home – a common thread through her work as she navigates her own position as a mixed-race Singaporean having to shift between two versions of home.
Her most moving expression of this search is arguably found in “Home: One Day I Will Find It” where she “follows the smell of food: fried ikan bilis, roast lamb, mangoes”. The smells are all the speaker has for navigation, and even when she arrives, the “code for entry will be in braille / and I must stand in a dark room at midnight, weeping, evoking a sense of sensory dissonance. Despite this blind search, she does find it in the end and gives it to us, her reader, like a mirage in the desert.
It will be a skyscraper, fifty storeys tall.
It will be the smallest, most picturesque cottage.
I will live there alone and with everyone I love.
The contrast present in these images only points to the impossibility of ‘home’.
Lo’s domestic poems about life at home and of motherhood paint poignant pictures of the world inhabited by women. A striking and daring picture of childbirth is found in her poem “No Epidural”, the title itself a boast and badge of honour in the tribulations that come with the experience. She compares the experience of labour to a gladiator fight, surfing and dancing before the delivery of her child, “the bird that breathes in the sea”.
Other domestic duties relegated to women in traditional families, such as cleaning the house carries the weight of humanity’s burden in its significance to Lo. She speaks of the “woman at the kitchen sink” in “Ars Poetica” without whom “nothing is possible.”. The art of poetry is encapsulated in the act of dishwashing itself. She beseeches the reader to “listen” and “remember her song”, where we are meant to begin. She continues in “Cleaning Out Beneath the Stove” where she considers the histories of the families that lived in her Brisbane apartment before, caked in the grime that sits beneath her stove. She asks for a “historian in dust” or a “geologist of grease” to “peel the layers back” before she erases them with the “Pine O Cleen”. Cleaning becomes a way to bring about order into her world, such as in “A Pastor’s Wife Listens to Stories from the Royal Commission”, where the persona listens to stories of child abuse committed by priests. Broken-hearted, she cries, “what have we done / O my people / the lambs / left to the ravening wolves” before wishing for their redemption as easily as she can stack clean dishes on the draining board. The biblical imagery of the lambs and wolves brings this event to the realm of a spiritual battle that Lo’s persona aims to reconcile with through her cleaning, which symbolises the principle of spiritual purity in Christianity. Her position as a pastor’s wife, as well as her personal religion, has played an important role in her discussions about gender roles. While poems such as “A Pastor’s Wife Listens to Stories from the Royal Commission” indicate an assertion of her agency and independence as she responds to the events in her life on her own terms, these responses remain more conservative or traditional. Her understanding and representation of being a woman, and her brand of feminism, are still ones heavily informed by Christian doctrine.
The role of Christianity as a major inspiration in her poetry is one Lo does not disguise. In the collection’s author’s bio, she states that “she writes from a faith perspective that remains open to finding common ground with others”, and this intention is particularly palpable in Who Comes Calling? Her meditation on Christian poetry in her Substack titled “What is a Christian poem” quotes essayist Heidie Senseman’s proclamation that neither the “resentful ‘exvangelical’ narratives” nor “sanitized Christian ones” in Christian literature tell “the whole story” of Christianity. Lo claims in response that a good Christian poem could bridge the gap between the “ugly truth” of these other narratives and the “beautiful truth” of God’s word. (Little Lightnings) While her religious references are deeply Christian, Lo approaches them with the openness that she promises in her bio. The sense of humour she infuses into these poems removes didacticism and allows for her non-Christian readers to arrive at this common ground that she aspires towards. In “Easter, Margaret River”, she complains of the skateboarders and marijuana-smoking teenagers outside her bedroom window at 2 am on Easter Saturday, who compromise the reverence of the event with their “tired old language of rebellion”. The juxtaposition in the imagery here between the disruptive energy of recalcitrant teenagers and the solemnity of Easter marries the duality of sharing a religious experience with the non-religious in a secular society.
In other poems, Lo offers her faith up as prayers (“Winesong”, “At the Kitchen Table”) and finally at the end of the collection, with a sermon of sorts. “Catching the L-Words” is subtitled an epithalamium, a poem meant to celebrate a marriage. It reads, however, with the wisdom and didactic tone of a spiritual force. Its message soothes every reader in its sense of spirituality despite its Christian register.
Don’t let go of love, Let it circle you like the rings that
you wear. It is the single thing that can carry you through
calamity’s cataclysm, that can turn the stories of your
scars towards hope, that can bear you, shining and whole,
through death’s door, into that invisible world that waits
for us, where justice rolls down like waters, and
righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
With these words, Lo brings us to the end of Who Comes Calling? with a generous poetic celebration of her readers’ humanity. Her final line, “May your longings always lead you to lasting landings”, captures all the buoyant alliteration of the L-words she dedicates to us and transports us to our “landings” - home.
Works cited
Lo, Miriam Wei Wei. Against Certain Capture. 2nd ed., Apothecary Archive, 2021.
—. “What Is a Christian Poem?”, Little Lightnings, 19 Feb. 2025, miriamweiweilo.substack.com/p/what-is-a-christian-poem.
—. Who Comes Calling? WA Poets Publishing, 2023.
