Description
Steam rises from bowls of noodle soup, tender steaks are seared in butter, sand-roasted chestnuts are shared from a paper bag. Eating Air – the debut pamphlet from Suyin Du Bois – is a mouth-watering collection of poems about food, belonging and connection. Charting a journey across cuisines and continents, these poems carve into the author’s dual Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian heritage and food’s enduring role in our cultural, familial and personal histories. From the low stools of Penang’s kopitiams to the bright lights of London’s Chinatown, Eating Air is a love song to food and a poignant catalogue of its profound capacity to serve up memory, language, and longing.
Suyin Du Bois is a poet of mixed Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian heritage, living in London with her South African husband. Her poems have been published in Propel, Iamb, Stanzas, Bi+ Lines: An Anthology of Contemporary Bi+ Poets (Fourteen Publishing, 2023) and Malaysian Places and Spaces (Maya Press, 2024), amongst others. She is a member of the Southbank Centre’s New Poets Collective 2024/25. When not obsessing over word choice, Suyin spends her time building a profit-with-purpose start-up that seeks to ensure 24/7 access to nutritious, affordable food for NHS hospital staff. Eating Air is her debut pamphlet.
Praise for Eating Air
“Suyin Du Bois’ Eating Air is a short but beautifully sweet (and savoury) evocation of food — its travels, connections and intimacies across time and space. Formally inventive, these poems are also both richly sensuous and wonderfully concrete in their explorations of eating, family and love.” ~ Hannah Lowe
“Precise and fulsome in its appetites and attentions — in this beautiful book, food becomes a prism for every kind of relationship.” ~ Will Harris
“Bittersweet, burning, intricate — these poems slip through languages and timezones to hold the weight of our hunger. Each poem like a fruit with textured skin, Suyin Du Bois writes with a sharpness that peels back layers of memory to reveal heat and longing at the core.” ~ Nina Mingya Powles
“From the backstreets of George Town, Penang, to the bakeries of Jette, Brussels, to cruising at thirty thousand feet – Du Bois takes you through the most tender, nostalgic, and sometimes grief-stricken moments of her life in an anthology of impeccably recounted flavour souvenirs. Where her familial tongues of Hokkien or French or Afrikaans have not sufficed, food is the language that fills her mouth. A deliciously fluent stroll – ‘makan angin’, eating air – with the characters and conversations that shape the poet’s food memories.” ~ Jenny Lau
“In Eating Air, food becomes an archive, carrying whole geographies of longing. Tender, sensuous, and quietly devastating, these poems trace how taste can preserve what is fleeting, and how memory nourishes the body.” ~ Romalyn Ante
“This pamphlet is a beautiful exploration of identity, where food gets to be a way into complicated and complex storytelling that is generous and tender. Suyin Du Bois’ writing tangles and untangles identity in a delicious way, that allows the reader to feel transported, whilst also seeing an inner story of self.” ~ Anna Sulan Masing
Suyin Du Bois’ debut poetry pamphlet is a tapestry of shared cultures, a smorgasbord of delectable delights and rough estimations; a rich blend of seasoned memories and flashes in the pan. Eating Air is complex, intimate, and oftentimes devastating; a journey into the past in an attempt to preserve the present, always just seconds out of reach. ~ Laura Sygrove, Everybody’s Reviewing
