WINNER OF THE COSTA POETRY AWARD
POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION
Fl-e (the French word for -arrow-) is an offensive technique commonly used in fencing, a sport of Mary Jean Chan-s young adult years, when they competed locally and internationally for their home city, Hong Kong. This cross-linguistic pun presents the queer, non-white body as both vulnerable (-flesh-) and weaponised (-fl-e-), 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 nation
