Mary Jean Chan for Bright Fear
Monday 18th September 2023
Topping & Company Booksellers of Bath, York Street, Bath, Somerset BA1 1NG
7pm
7.30pm
Join us for a reading by Mary Jean Chan for their keenly anticipated new collection which speaks 'out of fear and grief into splendour and joy.'
Mary Jean Chan is the author of Fleche which won the 2019 Costa Book Award for Poetry. Chan was guest co-editor with Will Harris at The Poetry Review in Spring 2020, and recently co-edited 100 Queer Poems with Andrew McMillan.
Following on from their award-winning debut, Fleche (2019), comes Mary Jean Chan's gleaming second collection: Bright Fear.
These poems engage fearlessly with intertwined themes of identity, multilingualism and postcolonial legacy. Questions of acceptance and assimilation are both explored through a family's evolving dynamics and exposed through close attention to the microaggressions of queerphobia and the anti-Asian racism that accompanied the Covid pandemic.
Yet Bright Fear remains deeply attuned to moments of beauty, tenderness and grace. Throughout, Chan offers us new and galvanising ways to 'withstand the quotidian tug-of-war / between brightness, terror and love'.