Synopsis

What's Left Is Tender explores tenderness as an act, an affect, a relation, a sensation, a theory. In a series of lyric and formal experiments, this collection interrogates how tenderness is often at the very intersections of disability, queerness, and race and how often that tenderness can also simultaneously mean struggle, discomfort, and even trauma. These poems explore the tenderness of being cared for, of caring for others and how that care can sometimes itself be painful even as it may attempt to ease that pain. This book ultimately asks if poetry's tenderness can tender new ways of thinking about the ethics of care.

Keywords: tender/tenderness, queer, Asian American, desire, disability, embodiment, pain

Advanced Praise for What’s Left Is Tender

Often, “the work of living”—especially the work of minoritized living—is the work of coming to understand how we have been shaped by violent, tender inheritances and laboring, slowly, to become our own shapes. In this tradition, Travis Chi Wing Lau’s What’s Left Is Tender is a virtuosic act of crip/queer/diasporic formalism. The poems curve and fracture and hobble and speak across their own gaps; they work with and against received poetic forms; they take up unexpected postures on the page. And, through this careful attention to form, Lau is able to attend with as much care to the tender knots of queer shame and desire, family inheritance as debt and condition of possibly, medicine as violence and promise of relief. In this way, line by line, Lau carries his reader through a “quiet manifesto” on what it takes to truly honor and be directed by the queer, crip, and otherwise “deviant will // that shapes our form,” on the futures available to us if we attend, with each other, to their “soft making.”
—Cameron Awkward Rich, author of Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016), Transit (Button Poetry, 2017), Dispatch: poems (Persea Books, 2019), and The Terrible We: Thinking With Trans Maladjustment (Duke University Press, 2022)

From list to radical erasure, from abecedarian to wailing prayer and “quiet manifestos,” this formally restless book challenges a world bent on stamping out bodies deemed error and desires named aberrant, not worth the music that pulses on every page here. No, these poems say, pay attention, “dream of that nectar again.” Travis Chi Wing Lau is that rare poet who can combine deep erudition with keen feeling—his literary and historical references are many and layered, but never does he lose his capacity for concrete intimacy, for addressing, say his own nipple. “May you mackerel / with majesty,” declares another poem, and I believe that I will do just that, for I am swayed by its sound—and by, yes, the tenderness. 
– Chen Chen, author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017) and Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (BOA Editions, 2022)

Shuttling dynamically between the languages of myth and medicine, drawing on inheritances from family and from literary history, What’s Left Is Tender investigates the body’s fragility—its bewildering, alluring hardness and softness. The poems themselves make dazzling shapes on the page and in the mind. In Travis Chi Wing Lau’s deeply learned and deeply felt poems, ‘full of / your tender / zeal,’ we find a craft for living.

– Richie Hofmann, author of Second Empire (Alice James, 2015) and A Hundred Lovers (Alfred A. Knopf, 2022)

Very rarely one opens a debut poetry collections and feels one is reading the author's fifth or sixth book--it is that captivating, and skillful. Travis Chi Wing Lau's What's Left Is Tender is such a book. But why? Because the metaphysics of the body here are given a myriad perspectives, from the author's own story, to travail of the horrorshow known as contemporary American medical system, to the larger question of what it means, after all, to be alive in the body, to the very lovely sensual lyrics teaching us that "compassion is a holding" -- this book is bursting with possibilities of "body and its discontents". Then, there is the question of Lau's treatment of English language, which, to my mind, is disability poetics at its best: formal inventiveness here happens not because the author is showing off their obviously considerable knowledge various formal skills, but because it is viscerally, humanly necessary: there is no other way to say a thing except via innovation. Indeed, reading this book one can see what Mallarme meant when he said that poem is not about an event, it is an event, which is to say: here's a poetics that invents an elegance all its own, "a tendering". Beautiful, necessary work.

–Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) and Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019) 

Travis Chi Wing Lau’s What’s Left is Tender reveals discoveries like a mosaic. The poles and magnetic fields of internal crippledness are illuminated on the wall. These poems are by turns ironic, bold, and affectionate. 

—Stephen Kuusisto, author of Planet of the Blind (Dial Press, 1998), Only Bread, Only Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2000), Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening (W. W. Norton, 2006), and Letters to Borges (Copper Canyon Press, 2013)

Travis Chi Wing Lau's dexterity of form reminds us that one is both broken by and healed by poetry: it keeps vivid account of what is felt by our massive nervous system as we encounter the pains of living inside our bodies. It also provides a way to cast spells, to invoke powers beyond our limitations and to harness that energy for our renewal and restoration. These poems are architectural wonders, intricate as spider webs and with that same tensile strength that defies any attempt to break its liquid surface. They are seismic eruptions recorded with a sensitive needle, the transcriptions of what shook and moved the ground beneath the poet's feet. You, too, reader, feel the tremorous effect of these tremendous terrestrial events.

– D. A. Powell, author of Chronic: Poems (Graywolf Press, 2009), Useless Landscape, or a Guide for Boys: Poems (Graywolf Press, 2012), Repast: Tea, Lunch, Cocktails (Graywolf Press, 2014)

At no point does Travis Chi Wing Lau let you forget that the soul resides within a body, regardless of how that body is seen. In What’s Left is Tender, Lau asks us to consider what it means to be tender, not as a result of violent hammering but as a result of tenderness begetting tenderness. In poems that refuse to avert their gaze, Lau requests we reconsider the body. “Be prepared for your flesh and your name, like your days, to be numbered,” he writes. Be prepared for this collection to take hold of you and not let go.

– C. Dale Young, author of The Day Underneath the Day (TriQuarterly Books, 2001), The Second Person (Four Way Books, 2007), Torn (Four Way Books, 2011), The Halo (Four Way Books, 2016), Prometeo (Four Way Books, 2021), and Building the Perfect Animal: New and Selected Poems (Four Way Books, 2025)

Travis Chi Wing Lau (he/him/his) is the author of three previous chapbook collections: The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press, 2019), Paring (Finishing Line Press, 2020), and Vagaries (Fork Tine Press, 2022). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-A-Day” series, The Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins series, Action, Spectacle, Barren Magazine, Cincinnati Review, fourteen poems, Foglifter, Glass, Hypertext, Impossible Archetype, Nat. Brut, Rogue Agent, The South Carolina Review, Tupelo Quarterly among many others. His work has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology, republished in Queer Nature (Autumn House Press, 2022), and longlisted in the Best American Essays anthology (2020). He was the winner of the Christopher Hewitt Award for Poetry (2019) and a recipient of the Greater Columbus Arts Council’s Artists Elevated Prize (2024). He is co-editor of Every Place on the Map Is Disabled: Poems and Essays on Disability (Northwestern University Press, 2026). He holds a B.A. in English/Classics from UCLA, M.A. & Ph.D. in English from The University of Pennsylvania. He currently teaches eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies at Kenyon college and lives in Columbus, Ohio.