Flèche (Winner of Costa Poetry Award 2019)

Author: Mary Jean Chan
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Language: English
Year of Print: 2019
Binding: Paperback
Print Length: 78 Pages
ISBN: 9780571348046
About the Book

WINNER OF THE COSTA POETRY AWARDPOETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATIONFlèche (the French word for 'arrow') is an offensive technique commonly used in fencing, a sport of Mary Jean Chan's young adult years, when she competed locally and internationally for her home city, Hong Kong. This cross-linguistic pun presents the queer, non-white body as both vulnerable ('flesh') and weaponised ('flèche'), and evokes the difficulties of reconciling one's need for safety alongside the desire to shed one's protective armour in order to fully embrace the world.Central to the collection is the figure of the poet's mother, whose fragmented memories of political turmoil in twentieth-century China are sensitively threaded through the book in an eight-part poetic sequence, combined with recollections from Chan's childhood. As complex themes of multilingualism, queerness, psychoanalysis and cultural history emerge, so too does a richly imagined personal, maternal and national biography. The result is a series of poems that feel urgent and true, dazzling and devastating by turns.