Mary Jean Chan

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Ars Poetica

I am a poet, I said to my own shame, its perennial flowering of queerphobic introjections.
I am a poet, I said to my beloved mother, whose love I once had sufficient reason to doubt.
I am a poet, I said to the many wild mouths from which microaggressions and harms flow.
I am a poet, I said to the world’s rage, its grief. Now, I offer this back, the way the trees do.

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MARY JEAN CHAN is the author of Flèche (Faber, 2019), which won the 2019 Costa Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the 2020 Dylan Thomas Prize. Chan is Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University and lives in London.