Join Ernest & Hadley Booksellers as we welcome Pearl Kan to our stage to share her debut poetry collection, My Uppalavanna, Friday, September 11 at 5:30 PM. Pre-order your copy today!
My Uppalavanna takes its title from the legendary Buddhist nun who was enlightened by staring into lamplight as she swept in the evening—and Pearl Kan’s debut collection follows that luminous, domestic gesture into the fullness of contemporary life. Navigating the paradox between spiritual emptiness and the irreducible particulars of the world—lost teeth and dynamited buddhas, pelicans low against the cold sea, a child’s sunrise lifted on butter and milk—these spare, precise poems move between Zen practice, motherhood, and the mystery of everyday perception with utter clarity. Both incantatory and quietly vernacular, My Uppalavanna is an astonishing first collection.
"The vision of a poet-priest, My Uppalavanna dwells in a paradox: how to reconcile the fullness of life with the emptiness enshrined by spiritual doctrines, when we know both to be unbearably true. The poems gathered here are songs of living and child-rearing, populated by lost teeth and dynamited buddhas, the cycles of seasons and the unrepeatable particulars of home. Pearl Kan has given us an astonishing first collection: incantatory, affectionate, and wise."
—Anna Della Subin, author of Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine
PEARL KAN studied comparative literature at the University of Chicago. She is trained as an attorney and practiced for over ten years in environmental and public law. Pearl’s poems have been published in the New York Review of Books, Posit Journal, and Harvard Divinity Bulletin. Pearl was ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest by Norman Fischer in June 2026 and practices with the Everyday Zen Foundation. She lives in Santa Cruz, California with her family.