Asian Stories, Asian Storytellers: To Love the Coming End by Leanne Dunic

This May, please join us in celebrating Asian Heritage Month: a recognition of the humanity, power, and ongoing struggles of Asian communities throughout the world. Book*hug Press is honoured to have published ground-breaking, critically-acclaimed fiction, non-fiction, and poetry by Asian authors, and for the next several weeks, we’ll be shining a light on these authors and their brilliant work. We know that our work, as allies, doesn’t end with blog posts, nor does it end at the end of May; the fight for Asian empowerment is perennial. We encourage you to support—and defer to—Asian voices, organizations, and initiatives, such as the ACLA (Asian Canadian Labour Alliance) and Butterfly (Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network).

Our series begins with To Love the Coming End, Leanne Dunic’s debut book. In this lyric travelogue that moves between Singapore, Canada, and Japan, a disillusioned author obsessed with natural disasters and “the curse of 11” reflects on their own personal earthquake: the loss of a loved one. Dunic’s debut captures what it’s like to be both united in and separated from the global experiences of trauma, history, and loss that colour our everyday lives.

“Elegant and spare, Dunic’s elegiac writing touches on grief that is both personal and societal,” writes Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang. Doretta Lau writes, “In these fervent poems of disparate landscapes are catastrophic feelings of sadness, loss, and alienation.”

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Leanne Dunic transgresses genres and form to produce projects such as To Love the Coming End and The Gift. She is the leader of The Deep Cove and lives on the unceded and occupied Traditional Territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ peoples.