close distance

This book contains fourteen short stories written by Poon Kwok-ling between 2005 and 2010. Each story is an independent creation, yet they all revolve around several whirlpools of life: love, the body, and urban space, all swirling amidst the waves of memory. Most of the stories feature two characters, but their continuous dialogue often sounds like a single person's litany; a duet might be a shadow dance, and when even the shadows disappear, one is left to listen to the silence of one's own body. However, while individuals can be fragmented, they can never truly disconnect from society. Intimate emotions are often linked to urban changes, building castles out of fragmented pieces as time slips away. Love, the body, and the city all decline together, and the author, as a mourner, plants bouquets of blooming roses for the "City of Devotion." It is said that endlessly deferred mourning is melancholia. The author draws creative power from this, repeatedly practicing the game of sudden departures and reunions, disappearances and reapparances. There is sometimes a sudden playfulness amidst the weight, making even the most ordinary childhood games eerie, with a chill seeping through the poetry. Intimate distance, ineffable, is both the inevitable trajectory from intimacy to distance, and the paradoxical coexistence of intimacy and distance.