Bright Fear (Paperback)

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. It asks how we might find a home within our own bodies, in places both distant and near, and in the 'constructed space' of the poem. The contemplative central sequence, Ars Poetica, traces the radically healing and transformative role of poetry during the poet's teenage and adult years, culminating in a polyphonic reconciliation of tongues. Throughout, Chan offers us new and galvanising ways to 'withstand the quotidian tug-of-war / between brightness, terror and love'.