From the kitchens of mother, grandmother, and self, Kathryn Lennon’s debut collection Duckweed 浮萍 is the culmination of years of reading, writing, publishing, and performing.

Duckweed 浮萍 gets it’s title from a Chinese proverb describing wanderers, people with little or no roots. The poems in this collection explore the process of wayfinding: acting as signposts through landscapes of time and space as the poet works to locate herself in language, race, gender, place, culture, migration, and a collective and family history. Problematizing orientalist tropes, these poems wander between English and Chinese, at times keeping the languages separate, at times interweaving them. They wander between the personal, the historical, the systemic; between Edmonton’s and Vancouver’s Chinatowns; between the kitchens of mother, grandmother, and self. 

Kathryn Lennon’s debut collection is the culmination of years of reading, writing, publishing, and performing her poetry throughout Canada. Recalling the work of Christine Wu and D.M. Bradford, Lennon is a poet engaged in the practice of elevating everyday lived experience towards the sublime. Kathryn Lennon is a poignant new voice in Canadian poetry.

Praise for Duckweed 浮萍

"Duckweed 浮萍 deftly weaves together past and present into a mixed-tongue heritage of longing, ache, and wonder. Here, Kathryn Lennon re-members her ancestors through poems of gentleness, subversion, persistence and grace while wrestling with what has been lost and what remains alive to nurture into new generations. This collection emerges in the slippages between forgotten Cantonese and colonized English, refusing to look away from a history of exclusion and a homesickness that might never be relieved. I felt seen in these poems--they made me think of home, wherever that is."
—Christine Wu, award-winning author of Familial Hungers

“Language takes courage. Duckweed 浮萍 is Kathryn Lennon’s brave wandering towards the ingredients that landscapes language. With care and carefulness, this collection invites you into Lennon’s hunger towards her Asian heritage, desegregating both heart and head, unfolding an intergenerational meal rooted in love.”
—Medgine Mathurin, award-winning poet and 2025-2027 Edmonton Poet Laureate

“The poems in Kathryn Lennon’s Duckweed 浮萍 are an invitation to stand in the doorway between languages and cultures, “Tuning taste buds to different frequencies” as they show us ways to “mend” the gap, a potent invocation to being in between; languages, dialects, parents, cities, histories and stories. Lennon’s clarity about living in the hyphen between Chinese and Canadian is powerful in its candor and simplicity. The “different frequencies” can be loud and complex but Lennon manoeuvers the disjunctions by grounding her narrative in the local: indigeneity (Dene, Cree, Metis); food (Wendy’s Cheeseburger or sticky rice); community (Chinatown, Powell Street, family kitchen); and, poignantly, language(s). This is poetry’s doorway and Duckweed makes it a busy, playful, and vigilant place. You can’t pass through without being touched.”
—Fred Wah, award-winning author of Waiting for Saskatchewan and Diamond Grill

"Kathryn Gwun-Yeen Lennon examines with clarity and precision the distances that grow out of lost language and erased histories. The poems in Duckweed 浮萍 capture so well the longing of those of us in the Chinese diaspora who are forever in search of home."
—Teresa Wong, award-winning author of All Our Ordinary Stories

“Kathryn enjoyed reading from a very young age. I always love to read her writing. When I read  ‘Dragons Might Have Been Here’ I was so moved and proud of her passion towards the history of Chinese Canadians. I feel that she has ways in her writing to express her sense of social injustice to different groups of people in our society. She travelled to Hong Kong with good intentions and she learned something, not what she expected. That experience might have made her realize the complicated intergenerational relationship that can occur among individuals who love and respect each other. Reading ‘Hunger is Inherited’ I immediately have the images of the interactions between her and her Poh Poh. The sense of good intentions mis-interpreted and not able to communicate was emotional. When she used “Three-inch Golden Lotus” to share glimpses of her mother and Poh Poh’s lives I felt that was clever and further reminded her sister and herself to be brave to face challenges in their lives. I am always proud to be a loyal cheerleader in her writing career.”
—Wai-Ling Lennon, Kathryn Gwun-Yeen Lennon’s mother