GAZE BACK
Winner of the Singapore Literature Prize (Poetry 2020)
What do we expect of an author who is unapologetically female? What do we expect of consuming art in general? Should a work be easy, should a work be safe?
Marylyn Tan’s debut volume, GAZE BACK, complicates ideas of femininity, queerness, and the occult. The feminine grotesque subverts the restrictions placed upon the feminine body to be attractive and its subjection to notions of the ideal. The occultic counterpoint to organised religion, then, becomes a way toward techniques of empowering the marginalised.
GAZE BACK, ultimately, is an instruction book, a grimoire, a call to insurrection—to wrest power back from the social structures that serve to restrict, control and distribute it amongst those few privileged above the disenfranchised.
GAZE BACK
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Reviews
“Marylyn Tan is an essential badass! Here is a voice for the audience of outcasts, an extraordinary poetry where the endangered body can find true solidarity. With an uncompromising lens on the human condition with sexts and symbols of moons and gender, resulting in unforgettable poems of deviance propelling culture forward.” —CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death
“This is an eviscerating, deliciously sacrilegious poetry that enacts, transgressing parameters of comfort and convention, its own agency for freedom within a post-gender, non-essentialist, even post-verbal, perspective, while also re-empowering what it means to be feminine and queer.” —Cyril Wong, author of The Lover’s Inventory
“GAZE BACK is eloquent confrontation – it challenges the ways in which society polices gender, and the boundaries by which many define poetry. Tan’s gaze is not just a reciprocal look. It is a forceful glare, an unapologetic gape, an accusing stare. It is a refusal to break eye contact.” —Tania de Rozario, author of And The Walls Come Crumbling Down & Tender Delirium
“ ... accessible and impenetrable; vulgar and abstruse; wise and streetwise; intellectual and also keenly felt.” —Junk Asia
Poetry
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homesick
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womb song
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Patient History
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dragon.paper.wind. (龙卷风)
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The Orchid Folios
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parsetreeforestfire
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Intruder
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Giving Ground
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Floating Clouds Beyond The Elastic Limit
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A Flying Crystal
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A Walk With My Pig
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A Bad Girl's Book of Animals
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GAZE BACK
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$21.00 SGD
Picking off new shoots will not stop the spring: Witness poems and essays from Burma/Myanmar (1988-2021)
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Some Say, A Tapir
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Farquhar
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Poetry Moves: An Anthology of Poetry
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Contour: A Lyric Cartography of Singapore
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To Gather Your Leaving: Asian Diaspora Poetry from America, Australia, UK and Europe
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Teaching Poetry To Adolescents: A Teacher's Guide to Little Things (first edition)
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a tiny space
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Right of the Soil
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Common Life: Drawings and Poems
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UnFree Verse
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Lost Bodies: Poems between Portugal and Home
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This Is Not A Safety Barrier: An Anthology of Poetry & Photography
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I Found A Bone and Other Poems
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Me Migrant
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Phedra
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Spomenik
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Bitter Punch
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Singapore Notebook & Blessed Isle
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UNION : 15 Years of Drunken Boat, 50 Years of Writing From Singapore
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Ars Poetica for the Day
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Do You Live In?
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The Wrong/Wrung Side of Love
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(Imperfect) Unhomed
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A Gathering of Themes
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Never Before—50 Essential Poems / 不可预期—诗精50首
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SG Poems 2017-2018
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A Crackle of Flames, A Circle of Rainbow
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Love at the Gallery
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SG Poems 2015-2016
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Pilgrimage
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Unhomed
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Crossing Universes
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一首诗的时间 2015
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Right of the Soil (Chapbook)
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Finding Francis: A Poetic Adventure
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Footfalls in the Rain
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Attunement
Is life hustling you out of tune? As the week roars by, we invite you to a slice of attunement penned lovingly by our authors, friends, and yours truly. Freshly delivered weekly with care. Intimacy guaranteed. Read selected letters below.
We Rise and Fall into Spring Blossoms
Jul 23, 2025
For years, pouring myself into this collection was an outlet to make peace with my past and also,...
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Touch Some Grass
May 7, 2025
We’ve traded that sense of freefall for control, but maybe in the process, we’ve lost the autonom...
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Anguish and Optimism
Apr 23, 2025
It is rare that an author wishes for their work to be irrelevant soon after it is written, but th...
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