The final poem in the collection begins with the Hungry Ghost festival, involving the release of paper boats and lanterns on water ‘to ensure // that the ghosts find their way / back’. Kan addresses Hyde directly as ‘you’: ‘I place five paper boats / in the stream. You gather them / downstream and somehow / send them / back to me.’ Kan’s book might be read as an offering to Hyde, a hungry ghost who returns his paper boats. Throughout it, Hyde appears as an apparition, along with other ghosts, in the ‘white spaces’ of the poems.

A series of poems revolves around another ghost; an unidentified friend who has gone missing. These are perhaps the most stylistically adventurous in the whole volume:

:a friend I have not heard of or from in over one year

: friend you have not heard of or from in over one year

: yes

: we would not be interested in helping you find him

Kan includes traces of his friend through poems written as Facebook messages with names redacted. As with his quest to ‘find’ Hyde, Kan seeks news of his friend through social media and ‘real life’ visits to a mental institution and a police station where he is unable to provide proof of their connection: ‘I don’t know / whether it was his being missing for over a year, or / whether it was his being a friend I had no evidence of / knowing’.

This friend is described as a Wu Tou Gui − ‘a headless ghost who roams/aimlessly, who has gone missing for himself/in the way of missing some-thing/he has never known’. The implication is that this lost person is also a writer who has battled mental health problems.

This Paper Boat reveals Kan’s ongoing interest in the use of non-linear and parallel narratives and ‘entangled and confused selves’. As Lyn Hejinian has argued in ‘The Personal and the Description’, the ‘personal’ is already a plural condition: ‘one is several, incomplete, and subject to dispersal’. In this collection, Kan intertwines Hyde’s ghost with other phantoms, bravely nudging poetic boundaries in the process.