Flèche

Much like the fencer who must constantly read and respond to her opponent's tactics during a fencing bout, this debut collection by Mary Jean Chan deftly examines relationships at once conflictual and tender. Flèche (the French word for 'arrow') is an offensive technique commonly used in épée, a competitive sport of the poet's teenage and young adult years. This cross-linguistic pun presents the queer, non-white body as both vulnerable ('flesh') and weaponised ('flèche') in public and private spaces. Themes of multilingualism, queerness, post-colonialism, psychoanalysis and cultural history emerge by means of an imagined personal, maternal and national biography, spoken by a polyphony of female voices. The result is a series of poems that are urgent and hard-hitting as Chan keeps her readers on their toes, dazzling and devastating them by turn.

Mary Jean Chan is the author of Flèche (Faber, 2019), which won the Costa Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award. An Italian translation of Flèche by Giorgia Sensi was published by Interno Poesia in 2023. Chan co-edited the acclaimed anthology 100 Queer Poems (Vintage, 2022) with Andrew McMillan. Bright Fear (Faber, 2023), Chan's second collection, is a Poetry Book Society Autumn Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2023 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Chan is the 2023-24 Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at the University of Cambridge and served as a judge for the 2023 Booker Prize. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Chan lives in Oxford.