GAZE BACK: Poems [Paperback]

Queer, female, and Chinese, MARYLYN TAN is a linguistics graduate, poet, and artist who has been performing and disappointing since 2014. Her work trades in the conventionally vulgar, radically pleasurable, and unsanctioned, striving to emancipate and restore the alienated, endangered body. Tan is the poetry reader for Singapore Unbound, founder of multidisciplinary arts collective DIS/CONTENT (hellodiscontent.carrd.com), and can be found in her habitat at instagram/marylyn.orificial or facebook.com/mrylyn. She lives in Singapore.

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

Poems that challenge power and elevate the powerlessThe monsters fought by the witch in GAZE BACK are the hoarders of power and the proclaimers of acceptability and order. But this collection is really for the monsters that fight alongside her: the vilified women and girls made grotesque in their rebellious femininity, the true readers of her grimoire. Tan waves her tongul"