Marylyn Tan

Gaze Back

Cyril Wong

Alicia Tuckerman

Jay Anderson

David Whish-Wilson

Rashida Murphy

Sabrina Dudgeon-Swift

Arin Alycia Fong

Jinny Koh

Laurie Steed

Aishah Alhadad

Chen Cuifen

Diana Rahim

Heather Teo

Leslie Thiele

Rachelle Rechichi

Rajkumar Thiagaras

Choo Ruizhi

Tinashe Jakwa

Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes

Endangered tigers connecting telepathically through time-travel; a guard’s ethical dilemma at a history museum; a slaughterhouse worker’s memories of his dead wife; a monochrome town upended by a wild watermelon…

In This Desert, There Were Seeds is an intimate collection of past and future dreams, featuring exciting new and established literary voices from Western Australia and Singapore. From our shifting sense of community and identity, to our frustrations with existing political, social and economic structures—this anthology transcends boundaries and captures the persistence of ordinary lives in deserts literal and metaphorical.

In This Desert, There Were Seeds

"What do we expect of an author who is unapologetically female? What do we expect of consuming art in general? Should a work be easy, should a work be safe? Marylyn Tan's debut volume, GAZE BACK, complicates ideas of femininity, queerness, and the occult. The feminine grotesque subverts the restrictions placed upon the feminine body to be attractive and its subjection to notions of the ideal. The occultic counterpoint to organised religion, then, becomes a way toward techniques of empowering the marginalised. GAZE BACK, ultimately, is an instruction book, a grimoire, a call to insurrection-to wrest power back from the social structures that serve to restrict, control and distribute it amongst those few privileged above the disenfranchised"--

Poems

Marylyn Tan's debut volume complicates ideas of femininity, queerness, and the occult. Theoretically informed, imaginatively reckless, and politically fierce, these poems gaze back at visual arts, literature, and everyday life to present a feminine grotesque that subverts the patriarchal viewpoint that has structured these terrains of thought and life. GAZE BACK, ultimately, is an instruction book, a grimoire, a call to insurrection to wrest power back from the social structures that serve to restrict, control, and distribute it among those few privileged above the disenfranchised. It is a poetic call to arms. This book rocked Singapore literature upon its publication, winning the Singapore Literature Prize in English Poetry in 2020 and making Tan the first woman to earn the nation's premier English-language poetry prize. Excerpt from "Nasi Kang Kang" the idea is witchcraft comes naturally to women but which witch women

Marylyn Tan

About

Books

Join the club