Jennifer Lee Tsai

Longlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2026

Jennifer Lee Tsai’s first full-length poetry book is a compelling narrative exploring family history, intergenerational trauma, love, loss, migration and belonging from the perspective of a second-generation British Chinese identity. Melete interweaves dual cultures and heritages, moving from China and Hong Kong to Liverpool.

The mythic structure of the book relates to the three original Boeotian Muses – Melete, Mneme and Aoede. Named after the Muse of meditation and contemplation, Melete navigates the boundaries between life and art, personhood and subjectivity, states and places of spiritual transcendence.

This expansive book establishes a powerfully distinctive lyric voice in British poetry.

‘Debut poets are so often described as “daring” that the word has lost its shine. However, in the first full-length collection by Jennifer Lee Tsai – a Liverpool-based fellow of the Complete Works programme founded by Bernardine Evaristo – its true meaning glimmers through. This courage is shaped by moving stories of her family’s migration to the UK […] “With this – she writes herself / back into existence,” Lee Tsai writes in Rebirth. It is words, after all, that first provided her with an escape, lifting her from the monotony of pressing lids on to food containers in her family’s Chinese takeaway, to lyrical flights that would make any poet proud.’ – Jade Cuttle, The Observer (Poetry Books of the Month), on Melete

'Lee Tsai’s debut is a sprawling mix of poetry and prose exploring second-generation Chinese identity in the UK [...] In exploring “the splitting of myself into two halves”, and showing the ambivalences in making sense of it, Lee Tsai has made a landmark work about the British south-east Asian experience.' – Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian (The best recent poetry), on Melete

'Jennifer Lee Tsai’s debut collection explores family history, feminism, love, loss and belonging. Named for the Boeotian muse, the poems bring to life the perspective of a second-generation Chinese woman writing against and toward the framework of the lyric poem [...] The strength in her poetics comes not just from her ability to put language into practice but also, in stark contrast, putting practise into language. Reading through the collection, I continued to experience the attention to detail from a reader and a scholar, the bounty of allusions and influences that fill every page.' – SK Grout, The Alchemy Spoon 

'Melete is the debut collection by the exceptional poet Jennifer Lee Tsai, a Northern Writers’ Award winner in 2020. Jennifer’s collection follows on from her absorbing and expansive two pamphlets, Kismet (ignitionpress) and La Mystérique (Guillemot). The poems in Melete reflect on Jennifer’s upbringing in Liverpool, migration, memory and family history.' – Will Mackie, New Writing North (New and Recent Poetry from the North, Spring 2026)

‘Melete is such an exciting journey. It draws connections between languages, cultures, histories and mythologies. It's at once ancient and timeless, and fresh and contemporary. It bristles with rage and sorrow, excitement and discovery. It's completely unique. As I read it, I felt like I was hurtling, travelling... yet all the while securely guided by the poet herself, who proved to be a very sure hand and a brilliant creative voice.’ – Bidisha

‘These extraordinary poems stage a reckoning – a woman refusing the labels imposed upon her and naming herself Melete, asserting her right to forge her own identity. They speak powerfully against exoticism, stereotyping, and the manifold forms of racism experienced by the Chinese in Britain. At the same time, they enact the Chinese tenet of ancestral veneration, animating the distinct presences of forebears and honouring the multiple roots – from China and within England itself – through which the speaker comes into being. This is a fierce and intelligent collection, threaded with moments of ars poetica, in which writing becomes a means of inscribing the self into voice.' – Hannah Lowe

'Powerful and distinct, Jennifer’s poems weave historical and personal trauma into a vivid, striking exploration of family, heritage, and personhood. Her work balances emotional depth, clarity, and sharp wit. At times meditative and lyrical, at others bold and incisive, Jennifer offers poetry that is both intimate and resonant.' – Romalyn Ante

'Rooted in Liverpool yet haunted by Canton, Hong Kong and the villages of the Hakka diaspora, these poems braid family myth with political history, from famine and migration to race riots and pandemic violence. The pages move between the intimate and the collective, exploring inheritance as Jennifer Lee Tsai revises the tradition to update it to our moment, revising how we speak. What is the deep urgency, necessity here? The act of writing becomes a correction, a ritual for justice, rebirth. The language itself enacts fragmentation, reconstruction. The sound becomes meaning, a longing is embedded in phonetics. This is a diaspora poetics, yes, but one that elevates personal trauma into archetype without losing specificity – the lover becomes Minotaur, the speaker Ariadne. The book gives us a generous abundance of visually arresting images that are both memorable and cinematic. This is an impressive debut.' – Ilya Kaminsky

'“I wait for the secret unknown in writing,” writes Jennifer Lee Tsai, attenuating a reader to the possibility and reflux of a literature that is both “tender” and “extravagant”. Melete’s experiment conjoins intimacy and dissent in ways that “remain unknown”. The secret recedes, mutating in each poem to become the presence of a beloved… And sometimes, that’s us.' – Bhanu Kapil

'Melete, the Muse of Writing, sits alongside her sisters Song and Memory and Jennifer Lee Tsai's first collection is indeed a remarkable blend of the lyric and the narrative – in essence, a sustained and enthralling novel-in-songs. Every poem is part doorway, part mirror. In Melete, we are led into a world of prejudice and determination, hardship and resilience, but this is also a world of beginnings, becomings and the search for belonging and in it we can't help but discover ourselves.' – John Glenday

'This is such a moving and accomplished collection. There’s a maturity here, and a wonderful willingness to push ideas, to keep pursuing them beyond initial thoughts, and to test the limits of language, as well as tease out the shifting meanings of words in translation. There’s a remarkable range in the imagery of this collection, drawn from so many aspects of contemporary society, the natural world and history. Powerful and innovative poems which are by turns tender, angry, intellectual and poignant.' – Victoria Mackenzie

‘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

Fallen Star by Jennifer Lee Tsai/Tmesis Theatre

Jennifer Lee Tsai reads her poem 'Fallen Star' performed by Pei Tong in this short film directed by Elinor Randle. One of five short films interspersing movement, image and words made with First Take, this was part of Tmesis Theatre's Lone Women digital project with a collection of female creatives and five amazing writers based in the North. Composer: Meike Holzmann. 

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