![]() ![]() ![]() The past is perceived in terms of physical tactility that is never far from literal pain and with a corollary ability to selflessly withstand it, but also rich with the intimacies of unspoken female love. ![]() The book begins with a moving tribute-poem (“Tempest”) to the poet’s grandmother who “soothes … with the smell of her, / of Tiger Balm and something acid, / and female underneath”, a mother-figure tenderer than her immediate mother, at least in the poet’s articulation of memory. Pathetic fallacy is self-consciously utilised in projecting inward conflicts and almost unbearable emotions upon the natural world the external becomes a mirror for the internal, providing a much-needed sense of catharsis as the mirror reveals how the personal can also be absorbed into the timelessly universal. ![]() The ambivalences of the past and the future react against each other through the prism of parenthood in a dialectical way, producing a poetic synthesis of emotions and revelations for what it means to exist as a wife and mother in the present day. Wendy Chin-Tanner’s poems in her debut full-length collection, Turn, returns with part-nostalgia and part-anguish to her Chinese-American childhood in New York City, while contrasting these memories with her current life. Cyril Wong reviews Turn by Wendy Chin-Tanner ![]()
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