Mary Jean Chan Books in Order

Drawing on fencing as an image of vulnerability and resistance, this poetry collection explores queer identity, language, and family relationships. Memories of Hong Kong and a mother’s experiences of political turmoil inform intimate questions of belonging and self-expression.

Edited by Michelle Tudor, this anthology gathers work by thirty-five contemporary poets from across the United Kingdom, including Mary Jean Chan. Its varied voices consider love, language, distance, and death through poems attentive to personal experience and public life.

Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan select a hundred poems spanning the twentieth century and contemporary writing. The anthology explores queer lives through childhood, desire, chosen families, changing homes, and relationships with history and the natural world.

These poems draw on childhood in Hong Kong and queer life in Britain to explore language, identity, and postcolonial inheritance. Family acceptance, institutional inclusion, and memories of SARS are reconsidered amid a new pandemic and the struggle to live with fear.