Following their award-winning debut, Fl-e (2019), comes Mary Jean Chan-s gleaming second collection: Bright Fear. Through poems which engage fearlessly with intertwined themes of identity, multilingualism and postcolonial legacy, Chan''s latest work explores a family-s evolving dynamics, as well as microaggressions stemming from queerphobia and anti-Asian racism that accompanied the Covid pandemic.
Yet Bright Fear remains deeply attuned to moments of beauty, tenderness and grace. It asks how we might find a home within our own bodies, in places both distant and near, and in the -constructed space- of the poem. The contemplative central sequence, Ars Poetica, traces the radically healing and transformative role of poetry during the poet-s teenage and adult years, culminating in a polyphonic reconciliation of tongues. Throughout, Chan offers us new and galvanising ways to -withstand the quotidian tug- / of-war between terror and love-.
-[Chan]
