Flèche
By Mary Jean Chan
Winner of the Costa Book Award for Poetry, Mary Jean Chan’s debut collection, Flèche, masterfully uses the rapid-fire tactics of fencing to navigate the complex combat of queer identity, postcolonial inheritance, and family trauma.
Bold yet profoundly tender, this multilingual collection wrestles with the physical boundaries of language on the printed page. By employing striking erasures, embedded Chinese characters, and inventive twin-column narratives, Chan bridges the inherited grief of the Cultural Revolution with the urgent realities of modern queer survival. Through these pages, she explores the delicate parries and counter-attacks of the mother-daughter bond, ultimately redefining both language and love as powerful acts of resistance.
