Description

“I moved to a country called writing” declares Tim Tim Cheng in this striking debut collection. The Tattoo Collector explores family history, displacement, politics, protest, and, as it moves between East and West, the uses of language to illustrate and interrogate what lies in between. As these poems range from Hong Kong, Scotland, and London, they unravel the relationship between the body, ecology and class with precise and haunting tenderness.

Here, in Cheng’s illuminating and needle-sharp poems, the tattoo is a narrative, the body a radical means of expression. In states of flux, between resisting and belonging, we enter museums, hospitals, graveyards, and gigs. These intimate and polyphonic poems invite us to be troubled and enthralled by exhibits and the stories they have to tell, to look inside the glass box and study what is on display. Close-up, the poems bring into the daylight details that can be seen skin-deep on the surface, as well as those which point to another meaning, inked indelibly, beneath.

Publisher Review

“Tim Tim’s urgent and taut poems articulate the structures we are born to, bound by, and spend a life breaking free from. The Tattoo Collector digs under the artifice of skin, language and even country to recover and define the self, before looking outward, asking “Why do I still believe-like a stranger- / that being understood could save us?” In spare and unrelenting language, these haunting poems explore the journey to-and cost of-chasing that understanding. This is a necessary and vital collection, one that articulates the experience of so many of us.” – Marjorie Lotfi — Marjorie Lotfi “Each poem in The Tattoo Collector is finely conceived and edited into a morsel of acute nourishment; and we didn’t know how hungry we were, as readers. Words and characters are flying fish and inky needles. As language glints and travels, we find new stories and understandings making shuddering interfaces with our skin. We’re changed as we read, marked, pierced, aroused. Tim Tim Cheng guides us through the political and personal, land and water, stylish use of language and the bigger risks of love. The poet is an original yet a storyteller of place and family; a rebel both generous and shy.” — Anthony Vahni Capildeo “Tim Tim Cheng’s The Tattoo Collector is an incredible debut. I was blown away by its breadth and precision of feeling / phrasing. It pays as close attention to the linguistic whirl of “all that grammar and glimmer” as it does to rescuing familial and political memory. It captures how phrases, like people, break, stutter, and start again. And though it realises that “being understood will not save us”, it extends our sense of who “us” is and, in doing so, achieves something hard and redemptive.” Will Harris — Will Harris