Gaze Back

By Marylyn Tan

Winner of the Singapore Literature Prize (Poetry 2020)

What do we expect of an author who is unapologetically female? What do we expect of consuming art in general? Should a work be easy, should a work be safe?

Marylyn Tan’s debut volume, GAZE BACK, complicates ideas of femininity, queerness, and the occult. The feminine grotesque subverts the restrictions placed upon the feminine body to be attractive and its subjection to notions of the ideal. The occultic counterpoint to organised religion, then, becomes a way toward techniques of empowering the marginalised.

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 amongst those few privileged above the disenfranchised.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ethos Books
• Release date: Aug 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9789811432514

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

GAZE BACK

Copyright © Marylyn Tan, 2018

ISBN 978-981-11-9080-3 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-981-14-3251-4 (E-book)

Published under the imprint Ethos Books

by Pagesetters Services Pte Ltd

#06-131 Midview City

28 Sin Ming Lane

Singapore 573972

www.ethosbooks.com.sg

www.facebook.com/ethosbooks

The publisher reserves all rights to this title.

Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Cover design by Justin Chia

Cover illustrations by Marylyn Tan

Layout and design by Pagesetters Services Pte Ltd

First published under this imprint in 2018

Typefaces: Adobe Garamond Pro, Gill Sans

National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing in Publication Data

Name(s): Tan, Marylyn, 1993-

Title: Gaze back / Marylyn Tan.

Description: Singapore : Ethos Books, 2018.

Identifier(s): OCN 1055689388 | ISBN 978-981-11-9080-3 (pbk) | ISBN 978-981-14-3251-4 (ebk)

Subject(s): LCSH: Femininity--Poetry. | Sexual minorities--Poetry. | Occultism--Poetry.

Classification: DDC S821--dc23

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with.

If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please consider getting your own copy from ethosbooks.com.sg. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Note to the Reader:

Adjusting type size may change line breaks.

Landscape mode helps to preserve line breaks.

gaze back

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