GAZE BACK: Poems

By Marylyn Tan

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

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780820362410

Marylyn Tan

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.

Book preview

GAZE BACK

MARYLYN TAN

GEORGIA REVIEW BOOKS

EDITED BY Gerald Maa

GAZE BACK

MARYLYN TAN

The University of Georgia Press

ATHENS

2022 paperback edition

by the University of Georgia Press

© 2018 by Marylyn Tan

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

All rights reserved

Printed and bound by Sheridan Books, Inc.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Most University of Georgia Press titles are available from popular e-book vendors.

Printed in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tan, Marylyn, 1993– author.

Title: Gaze back / Marylyn Tan.

Description: Athens, Georgia : The University of Georgia Press, 2022.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021043712 (print) | LCCN 2021043713 (ebook) | ISBN 9780820362427 (paperback) | ISBN 9780820362410 (ebook) Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

Classification: LCC PR9570.S53 T383 2022 (print) | LCC PR9570.S53 (ebook) | DDC 821/.92—dc23/eng/20211020

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021043712

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021043713

First published in the English language in Singapore by Ethos Books, an imprint of Pagesetters Services Pte Ltd Singapore 573972

Copyright © 2018 by Marylyn Tan

All rights reserved

For Daddy and Mummy, for fearing for me,

and letting me do what I need to, all the same.

If you’re unwilling to undress

don’t enter into the stream of Truth.

—RŪMĪ

sorry about the scene at

the bottom of the stairwell

and how I

ruined everything by saying it out

loud.

—RICHARD SIKEN

Litany in Which Certain Things are Crossed Out

the moon is not

a favor machine

—CACONRAD

Width of a Witch

CONTENTS

NASI KANG KANG

BLADES NAMED DELILAH

BARRIER METHOD

BEDROOM NUDE COFFEE TABLE BOOK

SEXTS FROM THE UNIVERSE

CURSING THE FIG TREE

C:\USERS\MARYLYN.TAN\UNDOCUMENTS\QUEER BODIES

UNICODE HEX

NASI KANG KANG

I asked the internet about nasi kang kang

google said:

some southeast asian cultures believe

that virginal fluids, including menstrual