Angry Yellow Woman by Vera Chok

Vera (they/she) is a queer Malaysian-Chinese actor, funny-person, poet and dogmum. They are both Disruptor and Homemaker. Best known as a co-author of The Good Immigrant, Vera wrote the chapter, Yellow, which exploded ideas around “East Asianness”. Vera has been published by The Guardian, Bloomsbury, and Brain Mill Press, and in Rising and Transect magazine. They have been commissioned by The Roundhouse, CNN, WeTransfer, and Hakkasan Group, and funded by The British Council. Their writing has been performed at The Roundhouse, Shakespeare North, Rich Mix, and at Byline, Stoke Newington, Dinefwr, Cambridge, and Bare Lit Festivals. Vera is also a regular participant and sometimes champion of Varjack & Simpson’s Anti-Slam. Vera co-founded The Brautigan Book Club, was a resident artist at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, and the actor who played Honour Chen-Williams, head of the first ever East Asian family in any UK continuing drama. They produce both gently joyful happenings and mischievous, chaotic celebrations to platform historically marginalised groups.

‘It’s little surprise that Vera Chok’s poetry shares the same sharp qualities as her performances on screen and stage. Every line in this radical collection is alive, yes, with anger, but also acute observation, boundless humour and an entirely singular imagination. Part memoir, part essay, part prose poem, Angry Yellow Woman is an explosion of words that deserves attention and demands to be read.’ LARA PAWSON

 

‘Angry Yellow Woman is outstanding and brilliant. It is unique and unflinching, powerful and moving. This work has a beautiful tenderness and wry humour. I love this book.’ SALENA GODDEN

 

‘Vera Chok’s poetry is by turns, thoughtful, political, mesmerising and absurdist. Their ability to move from belly splitting laughs to devastating quiet moments while also maintaining a fluid politics that never overshadows the lyrical wordplay is masterful, playful and brilliant.’ NIKESH SHUKLA

 

‘Vera Chok’s debut collection deliciously delivers complex, rich, tender, harsh, breathless, sexy, rage-full poems-as-spells. Here are words which affect change— Vera’s enquiries invite us to challenge and confront more—her expressions of anger and lust somehow gave me permission to consider my own. Visceral and breathtaking, vulnerable and tough.They are words like pearls found miles from the sea. Words like plants adjusting to the changes in weather and soil, resilient, persistent.’ BERNADETTE RUSSELL

 

‘This collection is a multilayered excavation into decades of built up microaggressions. The result is a mature poetic voice that boils over with visceral heat; at times seething, sometimes resigned, often hilarious.’ JENNY LAU

 

‘Lovely, joyful and strange. I loved it.’ ROWAN HISAYO BUCHANAN

 

‘Visceral, gut-punching, compelling. Vera Chok is one to watch.’ HELENA LEE

 

‘Vera Chok is a connector and warrior, picking at the edges of representation, writing nakedly about the complexities of race and desire.’ CRESSIDA KOCIENSKI

 

‘Searing, soaring words. This is a glorious, furious exhalation.’ MUSA OKWONGA

 

‘thrilling...the narrative drive of prose and the ability of poetry to depict the experiential, to contain several moments in the same small space’ DZIFA BENSON, Wasafiri, on Gannet

 

‘incredible… made me fall in love with language all over again’ - DANIELLE MCLAUREN, Half Pint Poet

 

‘Your work is like nothing I’ve come across before. The way that you use words as an experimental medium to rhyme ideas and sound and language was so exciting, new, contemporary and emotive - ELLA FRADGLEY

Format: Paperback / softback 100 pages
Publisher: Burning Eye Books
Imprint: Burning Eye Books
ISBN: 9781913958473
Published: 11 Apr 2024
Weight: 146g
Dimensions: 139 x 216 x 10 (mm)