Jennifer Lee Tsai’s first full-length collection explores family history, intergenerational trauma, love, loss and belonging through the perspective of a second-generation British Chinese identity. Named after one of the three original Boeotian Muses, the Muse of meditation and contemplation, this expansive book establishes a powerful lyric voice – interweaving narratives of memory, migration and mysticism across Liverpool, China and Hong Kong, dual cultures and heritages.
Comprising three distinct sections, which brings together Lee Tsai’s previous two pamphlets, Kismet and La Mystérique as well as new, uncollected work, Melete navigates personhood, subjectivity and the multitudes of the lyric ‘I’, transforming into states and places of spiritual transcendence and ecstasies.
Praise for Jennifer Lee Tsai's poetry:
‘Jennifer Lee Tsai’s poetry gives us a crystalline language for loss, silence and memory, where “breaking stabilities…like phonetic entities” make complex the lyric fractals of familial love, violence and desire. The tremendous force of her linguistic authority here reclaims fragments of narratives – of otherness, exile and shame – to offer a self in movement, a voice fired by discovery.’ – Sandeep Parmar
‘Kismet explores with sensitivity the gaps between generations, cultures and belief systems…we encounter versions of femininity that defy stereotypes…Filled with darkness and hope, Kismet conjures a world where the divide between the living and the dead becomes indistinct, where inner strength and love can transcend fears and bring healing.’ – Jennifer Wong,The Poetry Review
‘Jennifer Lee Tsai is a great find, balancing a certain lightness of touch with a questing, plainspoken sincerity. She uses her imagery delicately and well, with irony…the overall atmosphere of her work is one of effortless mobility and freedom, never dragging the reader down. The poems set in Hong Kong are standouts…’ – Bidisha,The Poetry Review
‘A central challenge for Lee Tsai in La Mystérique is how a person’s selfhood may be known in the face of denial. Exploring her family’s narratives of migration...Lee Tsai questions the forces and absences which shape both their journeys and the recording of their lives.’ – alice hiller, Poetry London
‘Jennifer Lee Tsai’s La Mystérique speaks against the silences of British-Chinese immigrant history, concerned more with ecstasy…A work of searing inquiry, intellectual acumen and the restlessness and resilience of language…It is utterly compelling work, moving inquiry about personhood, subjectivity and the matter of the lyric ‘I’ into a place of spiritual transcendence and consciousness.’ – S.Niroshini, Magma
‘These poems, which explore Chinese/Liverpool identity, bring a distinctively Northern British voice to the kind of expansive and mixed form of lyrical/essayistic poetry which is developing so richly and importantly in the U.S. and harks back globally to many older traditions of the fusion of prose and verse, music and argumentation…Writing on the Mersey River as a place of arrival and claiming it for the Chinese/Liverpool history is absolutely crucial to our clear-sighted and evolving vision of Britain today, with its histories tenderly transiting between intimacy and estrangement and back again.’ – Anthony (Vahni) Capildeo, Northern Writers Awards
Ireland & EU: Click here to order from Books Upstairs in Dublin
USA: Click here to order from Indiebound or Bookshop.org
