WINNER OF THE COSTA POETRY AWARD
POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION
Flèche (the French word for ‘arrow’) is an offensive technique commonly used in fencing, a sport of Mary Jean Chan’s young adult years, when they competed locally and internationally for their home city, Hong Kong. This cross-linguistic pun presents the queer, non-white body as both vulnerable (‘flesh’) and weaponised (‘flèche’), and evokes the difficulties of reconciling one’s need for safety alongside the desire to shed one’s protective armour in order to fully embrace the world.
Central to the collection is the figure of the poet’s mother, whose fragmented memories of political turmoil in twentieth-century China are sensitively threaded through the book in an eight-part poetic sequence, combined with recollections from Chan’s childhood. As complex themes of multilingualism, queerness, psychoanalysis and cultural history emerge, so too does a richly imagined personal, maternal and national biography. The result is a series of poems that feel urgent and true, dazzling and devastating by turns.
Flèche by Mary Jean Chan
Mary Jean Chan (b. 1990) was born and raised in Hong Kong. They are the author of A Hurry of English (ignition, 2017), a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice, and Flèche (Faber, 2019), their debut full-length collection, which is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Flèche additionally won the Costa Book Award for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award. Mary Jean won second prize in the 2017 National Poetry Competition, and has been shortlisted in the Forward Prize Best Single Poem category twice. They are also a former winner of The Poetry Society’s Anne Born Prize and of its Geoffrey Dearmer Prize. Mary Jean was guest co-editor with Will Harris of The Poetry Review in Spring 2020, and co-edited the anthology 100 Queer Poems (Vintage, 2022) with Andrew McMillan. A Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University, they live in London.