Name: Bi's review of Mao Wrote Beautiful Chinese Calligraphy by Mary Jean Chan
Item: Mao Wrote Beautiful Chinese Calligraphy
Rating: 5
Author: Bi

Mary Jean Chan

SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA POETRY AWARD POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION Flèche (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.

Mao Wrote Beautiful Chinese Calligraphy

a wonderful collection to have as my first poetry read of 2020!

Claudia

accessible poetry!! hong kong poetry!! canto romanisation holy s h i t !! sucking at chinese!! i feel so seen!! pecial shoutouts: to the grandmother who mistook me for a boy, what my mother (a poet) would say, this grammatical offer of uniqueness is untrue, splitting (!!!), wish, speaking in tongues.

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Mao Wrote Beautiful Chinese Calligraphy by Mary Jean Chan

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Bi &Mao Wrote Beautiful Chinese Calligraphy by Mary Jean Chan

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Bi &
Mao Wrote Beautiful Chinese Calligraphy by Mary Jean Chan