KOBO Seattle | since 1995

Just Added

Alan Chong Lau "This Single Road"


""We spend so much time on trains and subways that I can't resist sneaking in some sketches. I love the ephemeral moment when we as strangers on this earth get to spend mere seconds or minutes together sharing space before dispersing and never meeting again. Maybe it’s my own futile attempt to hold on to that elusive moment in time."

In This Single Road, poet and painter Alan Chong Lau opens his Kyoto notebooks to us— inexpensive pocket notebooks filled with quick sketches, poems, and fragments of daily life. Many of these moments return as watercolor postcards sent to friends, so what begins in private observation becomes a quiet act of generosity, a way of keeping connection alive through art.

Echoing the haibun tradition of Bashō and Santōka, This Single Road is less a travelogue than a record of engagement — intimate and playful — a lifelong conversation with place, with practice, and with Kazuko, his companion in life and art.

Alan Chong Lau is a poet and visual artist based in Seattle, Washington. He is the co-author of The Buddha Bandits Down Highway 99 with Garrett Hongo and Lawson Inada (Buddhahead Press, 1978) and the author of Songs For Jadina (Greenfield Review Press, 1980) and Blues and Greens: A Produce Worker’s Journal (University of Hawai’i Press, 2000). He serves as the arts editor for the International Examiner that covers news, features, and the arts for the Northwest’s pan-Asian Pacific American community. As an artist, he is represented by ArtX Contemporary Gallery in Seattle, Washington.

Softcover, 136pp.