After 29 years in Asia, including practicing law in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore for 25 years, I wrote Before Leaving the Island as part of a midlife journey, from 2019 to 2025, from Hong Kong through Singapore – both of them islands – to California.

I’m also co-translating an illustrated edition of Tang and Song dynasty poetry, and participate in a reading group that I co-founded in 2021 to explore modern and contemporary long poems. 

John Fadely’s poems are distilled meditations on topics as quotidian as a cycle of cicadas or as jolting as the sudden death of a woman in her prime.  In reading them, I’m reminded of Dos Passos’s vignettes—informative, disruptive, descriptive, charming, disturbing. Working from a cosmopolitan palette with Asian influences, Fadely toys with time, undermines death, and teases nature into revealing a secret or two, in words that delight in themselves. —Brian Bruya, Professor, Department of History and Philosophy, Eastern Michigan University and author of Ziran: The Philosophy of Spontaneous Self-Causation 

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