This is a guest review by Natalie Perman

Mary Jean Chan’s 2019 poetry collection Flèche is a cross-linguistic love poem to the queer body. A “book of love poems”, as declared in ‘Prologue’, Chan’s collection is defined by sparkling, crystallised images, often pulled from memory; such as how her mother, coming to see her fencing match, “gripped the railing until her marriage ring was folded into flesh”.

The focus on the physical is titular- ‘Fléche’ alludes phonetically to ‘flesh’ as well as denoting the technical offensive fencing move from the French word for ‘arrow’. As body and mind spar, the physical and metaphysical join unexpectedly; in ‘Flèche’ amidst the poem’s episodic jousting a blur of “entangled blades” focuses into “gleaming, smiling lips”. Within the physical fight rendered in the poem, and the physical and tactile in the collection, the potency of sexual desire brims beneath the surface.

These unique love poems- love poems to queerness, sexual and platonic love, family- are above all love poems to those who inhabit conflicting identities. Chan’s debut collection is defined by this intersection of contradictions: the sharp divide between her “mother’s Cantonese rage” versus “your soothing English”, the claim that to be queer “would be ‘ci sin’” and her own “blooms of ache”. The acceptance of the non-white queer body is a constant conflict, as Chan writes “a genuine acceptance of the self/continues to elude me”. However, the search for a space to home conflicting identities forges a beautiful exploration of past and present with the “mothers of history and/mothers of our present”. In this search for union in contradiction, Chan interweaves Confucian tales in “versions from the twenty-four filial exemplars”, her mother’s trauma and memories of political turmoil in poems such as “what my mother (a poet) might say” and the status of women, such as the ‘comfort women’ honoured in her poem “Dragon Hill Spa”.

Flèche’s power lies in its deceptive simplicity- the reader is effortlessly moved across linguistic and cultural boundaries towards the collection’s climactic act of self-awareness. This reaches its zenith in the “roots” and “blood song of your bones” which signal the realisation that “I’ve been looking everywhere / for forgiveness”. Each poem is exacting, its images unforgiving; in “an ode to boundaries” each line contains no more than 5 words, in another poem Chan recalls how “Once, during a bedtime storytelling, she sobbed until I cried for help, but father was asleep”. Only a few of Flèche’s poems seem to not realise their own emotional profundity as their language slips into the recognisable jargon of the love poem with its amorous tropes, such as of heartache, as one poem ends “that ache right there”. Despite this, these poems are still striking in their careful, precise verse.

This debut collection is striking, and Chen’s poems are urgent, armed and bared at the same time, and demand to be heard. Flèche is the highlight of what Mary Jean Chan can deftly achieve: to slip in and out of different tongues, confuse and enrich language, bare the vulnerable whilst charging it to be en garde.

Natalie Perman is an undergraduate at St John’s studying English and German. She is a Foyle Young Poet of the Year 2017, commended in 2018, and winner of the Forward Student Critics’ Competition in 2017. Contact her on Twitter with any burning poetry questions, passions or inquiries.