Tapping At Glass

By Tim Tim Cheng

Tapping At Glass charts girlhood, multilingualism, and psychogeography from Hong Kong to Scotland. Myths, meditations on the arts and mass media, and migration stories entwine. Through protest-stricken urban spaces, love hotels, farming as activism, frog watching, alternative therapies, and seascapes where racial and social memories flow in all directions, the working class subjects in Cheng's poems reflect on what it means to exist in one locale and dream of elsewhere, where the past and future, interconnectedness and othering, are in perpetual negotiation. Tapping into various moods, Cheng's poems question the making of a self and a city, and the languages one uses to translate microhistories.
Tapping At Glass is Tim Tim's debut pamphlet collection.
"Tim Tim Cheng is a wonderful new voice in the poetry landscape. Playful, serious, complicating any attempt to pin her down – even in the short span of a pamphlet she dances through images and ideas. Already so accomplished, she is definitely a poet who is going places." – Niall Campbell

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verve Poetry Press
• Release date: May 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781913917777

Tim Tim Cheng

Tim Tim Cheng is a poet and teacher from Hong Kong, currently based between Edinburgh and London. Her pamphlet Tapping at Glass is forthcoming with Verve in 2023. Her poems are published or anthologised in POETRY, The Rialto, Ambit, Cicada, Our Time is a Garden, and elsewhere. She has spoken in transnational literary panels across Asia-Pacific regions, the States, and the UK. Her latest appearances include the Hidden Door festival, and Loop, BBC Scotland. Named ‘one of the seven female poets to know in Hong Kong’ by Tatler Asia, she is also a William Hunter Sharpe Memorial Scholarship awardee, WRiCE fellow, and Roddy Lumsden Memorial Mentorship mentee.

Book preview

cover.jpgimg1.jpg

PUBLISHED BY VERVE POETRY PRESS

https://vervepoetrypress.com

[e-mail]

All rights reserved

© 2023 Tim Tim Cheng

The right of Tim Tim Cheng to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

FIRST PUBLISHED FEB 2023

Printed and bound in the UK

by Imprint Digital, Exeter

ISBN: 978-1-913917-29-6

ePub ISBN: 978-1-913917-77-7

CONTENTS

Bathtub

Like the Earth, I Become Hotter and Hotter

Icarus, a girl, talks to interviewers

Beds

SHE WILL

Boyfriend for Scale

Beginner’s Wall, Shek O

Clouds and Clouds

Shockproof

Topography

How Memory Works

Reiki

News, Nocturnal

Since Marina and Grace brought me white roses,

NOTES TO IMPOSSIBILITY

Field Notes

Salt and Rice

Boxed in

(H)ours

In and Out

The Tattooist

Froggos, froggone

Waterlogged

intertidal

Horrible Kids

How do you spell [         ] in Chinese

Ars Poetica with Translations

NO LANGUAGE

Self-Portrait of My Granny in the Voice of Anti-Japanese Drama’s Protagonists

Kindergarten

Sonnets with Skylines

Notes & Acknowledgements

Tapping

At Glass

Bathtub

The most pressing question today

is why your head

fits right onto my shoulder.

The rest is soap! soap! soap!

Like the earth, I become hotter and hotter.

(I starfished in your bed last night, you said.)

Have you seen one of those square starfish?

They look like a fucking wallet!

What’s star-shaped anyway?

You can’t outline explosions, can you?

(I pushed you out of bed, you said.)

Sounds like your problem.

Icarus, a girl, talks to interviewers

after The New York Times’ feature on the second Chinese female astronaut

You asked if I was afraid of the sun

melting my eye makeup.

I had waxed enough to know beauty burned

and some places were better left

untouched—questions, like ingrown hairs,

trapped under the skin in the wrong direction.

My father named me after my brother

but never made