Gaze Back

Georgia Review Books

by Marylyn Tan

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.

Genres: Poetry, Queer, Nonfiction, LGBT, Lesbian, Asia

88 pages, Paperback

First published October 31, 2018

About the author

Marylyn Tan is a sensuous and queer writer-artist-reprobate. Her work aims to subvert, revert and pervert, to disrespect respectability, to take pleasure seriously, and to reclaim power. Her first child, GAZE BACK (Ethos Books, 2018; Singapore Literature Prize, 2020), is the lesbo trans-genre grimoire you never knew you needed.

Reviews

[Sheena · Rating 5 out of 5]

UGH. I finished this book yesterday and I'm still thinking about it omg :')
Marylyn Tan takes everything that is conservative and puts a spin on it. She gives the occult, queerness, and femininity LIFE. I don't usually read poems, but this definitely blew me away. She gives voice to the disenfranchised and the writing is quite accessible (her use of the vernacular gave VOICE).

She pushes and she pulls and at the end she leaves you a lil bit breathless.

Thank you Nat for a copy of the book. Quite sad that this book won the Singapore Literature Prize for Poetry in 2020 and yet I couldn't find a copy to borrow as easily as I wanted to...............

Popsugar Reading Challenge 2021 - A book with a black and white cover

[All My Friends Are Fictional · Rating 5 out of 5]

I couldn’t have said it better than the author did:

„GAZE BACK presents re-imaginings of the feminine ideal, elaborated in the idea of gender minorities existing freely only within spaces marked as taboo. The archetype of the empowered woman is so often seen in patriarchal culture and entertainment as occult, sexually 'deviant', or only in markedly 'feminine' or matriarchal spaces. We are allowed our powerful witch crones, but only as villains. Women free from male control are generally failures of femininity in various ways: they are sexually promiscuous, predatory or plain undesirable. I was fascinated by the idea of the feminine grotesque as power. Is male desire disempowering?

Can autonomy be regained by the ugly, the dreadful, and the strange woman?

[…]

Furthermore, in keeping with the zeitgeist of identity politics while writing this book, the perennial question was what right do I have to be writing this? In the process of undergoing this book, my methodology and praxis was challenged, especially with regard to the possibilities of existence in liminal spaces.“

[Vyviane Armstrong]

This book was so intense and graphic. At this point in my life, post-menopausal living in the suburbs, going to bed by 10pm, I am not sure all of this was my cup of tea but that's okay because I am probably not the attended audience.

If I had read this as a young coming out queer, I would have carried it around in on my person, annotated the hell out of it and read the poems out loud at inappropriate venues.I appreciated the wide scope and styles this book covered in one short book while staying co-cohesive and relevant.

If you are in the States and your library has a Hoopla membership you can read this book on that app.

[Yaiza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full of unconventional interpretations of religion, reimaginings of Jesus as a girl walking home at night, and general queering of everything conservative. Really unusual form in places, and interesting use of language and structure throughout. Had my future told by the author at a local book sale the other day (ikr) and she is super cool to talk to as well, having left a very inappropriate and much appreciated signature at the front of the book. I look forward to whatever she writes next!

[Megha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bold, brave and unapologetic.
I really liked the format of the book, the author clearly pushes several boundaries but I also found several of her pieces lacking cohesiveness and clarity.
Overall, a really good debut, looking forward to the author's future works.

[formerfel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Complex. Yet able to tell its purpose

[Faterider · Rating 3 out of 5]

When you read about the “foreskin of Christ”, you know this poetry debut dares to be disarmingly different by pushing the boundaries. I dig the novel and funky format of various poems: flow chart, programming code, parentheses. I liked how they forced me to slow down my reading and sieve out meaning for myself - can’t refuse a good literary challenge. I also liked the fact that myriad registers of English were used, ranging for Ah Beng speak (that’s how my army buddies would speak) to in-your-face crude language (I rather liked how a last stanza for a poem applied the liberal use of the f word) to bombastic language. I didn’t relate too well to the poems which were replete with obscure combinations of words. I feel that while these poems might work well as spoken poetry because the manner in which they are read evokes a particular vibe, I could only scratch my idea as to what these combinations meant. But maybe that’s me - I like to read stuff that conjures very vivid imagery in my mind.

All in all, an interesting and fun book to read. I’m glad I gave it a shot.

[carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

a breakthrough in local poetry. utilises avant garde structures and methods, but pulls it off really well. very enjoyable to read for its substance and inventiveness.

[mm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tan writes in her Author's Note that she 'struggled very much with making the book "worth the audience's while"' but she needn't have worried.

This was such a engaging read. A book of poetry that is far more than one of a collection of poems. It gives voice to the disenfranchised – of ethnicity and sexuality – and that of the indigenous practices of the Nusantara region.

'Nasi Kang Kang', which opens the collection sets the tone for the rest of the book. Viscerally and intellectually, Tan describes the 'witchcraft' that is practised. But the lines which really stood out to me were the ones that hit out on how little we as a society know of each other –
'I said sian you all multicultural society
machiam like don't know other cultures sia'
& how true that is.

I love her use of the vernacular – some explained, some not.

Side note, the illustrations on the cover are also by Tan. Truly a talented poet and artist.

* Book purchased from the Singapore Writers Festival bookstore . . .

[Barton Smock · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Gaze Back, poet Marylyn Tan is a vandal of ache and etch whose verse erases plainness, whose voice knows to radio itself, whose vision evicts and eventually encodes. Ah the automated shrug of a shoulder, ah this constant state of notification. Tan’s is a prayerful anger of dismantling and differentiating, one that reimagines the student of injury into a wounded anti-weakness that tenderizes evasion might the promise of invisible scrutiny trick the microscope into seeing. Somewhere between documentary and dream, the body has its fun with pain and its cake with god. The whole work is a safe word sounding its de-worship of password. In the reading, I wanted to be resurrected, but was found alive. Wanted to look back, but the future of Gaze Back mattered. Matters.

[Wen-yi Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author's note describes the work as "linking the feminine to the deviant" and, as I was hoping, I found another singlit book that will be inscribed into my id. Did I understand all of it? no. was this exactly the angry, slightly kinky, unhinged "lesbian grimoire" poetry collection advertised? yes. vibes off the charts. thoughts to be thunk. Every Singaporean woman/femme author that cuts into complex femininity and is boldly, apologetically a gremlin (ALK my love) adds 10 years to my life. "I was fascinated by the idea of the feminine grotesque as power." she speaks my language. 10/10

[Enea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vote: 5/5.

This book was a witchcrafty f*ck you to patriarchy and cishet norms. I loved all of it, from the poems to the author’s final notes. It gives a figurative overview of practices of liberations for the body and the mind. Sex positive, queer, feminist, radical and straightforwardly direct. So refreshing and liberating.
Loved it and highly recommended. Especially to the white western queers like me who consume a lot of Western queer literature but do not go beyond European-American-British production.

[Cedric Koh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gaze Back starts off with a bang, describing a step-by-step procedure on how to serve menstrual blood in an unsuspecting bowl of rice to your lover.

It elicits laughs from the pure absurdity of its imagery of a woman squatting over a bowl of rice, showing how ridiculous the extents a woman could go to just to find a good husband, before reclaiming and redefining that act as something completely new, different and feminist.

A lot of the book covers the same themes about alienation and discrimination embedded in our modern-day society throughout the novel - always through new and fascinating ways. Some of the poems could prove to be too impenetrable and inaccessible to many of its readers with its experimentation and unconventional story-telling techniques. Some could dismiss this book as an indecipherable mess.

However, for me, I found that occasionally the poet manages to discover herself and reveal herself eloquently throughout some of the lines in the book. While some of the lines could be buried within a lot of seemingly indecipherable words. Overall, Gaze Back is a pretty decent debut for Marylyn Tan, and I would be interested in seeing how her later works will turn out.

[Nicola · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gaze Back sexualizes without titillating, delivers the truth about those subjected to male gaze without forcing them to submit yet again, ever again. It is a frenzy of images, a complete unheaval of the expected: in regards to language and content. "Cursing The Fig Tree" is perhaps the most revolutionary poem I have ever read. It is sacrilegious because Marylyn Tan realizes that to write convincing poetry, you must commit what men call sin.

[Minus One · Rating 5 out of 5]

First poetry collection I'm reading in a long time. Singlit poetry is sometimes too 'high up' for me to grasp but I don't want to resort to not trying to read it just because it cannot be deciphered. This was relatable. I would even say profound., working on multiple levels. Would read more from this author.

[Justin Chia · Rating 5 out of 5]

felt like the poems were trying to kill me in the best possible way

[Nat · Rating 4 out of 5]

weird, wild, and entirely worth reading for the holy prepuce poem alone

[R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25 stars*

[Pala Hux · Rating 4 out of 5]

An awe-inspiring collection of witty, witchy, queer poems. Pure blasphemy!

[Madi · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

really loved cursing the fig tree in this collection. still not sure if poetry is for me in general but i enjoyed this

[Angela]

Intense and graphic. Not my cup of coffee

[shiqin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stumbled across this book in a cafe at east coast road, was delighted to find poetry by local writers. I think the author, in this book often managed to capture some of the ways that women are portrayed in local society. I did not leave this cafe until i finished the whole thing in one sitting. Jia you local poetry writers

[Jee Koh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clearly talented and promising, but right now the code is hiding the person.

[Leia Deva · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am stunned. This was phenomenal!!!!!!!!!!!! Disruptive, difficult to swallow, taken so-far and too-far and yet just enough to make its impacts; empowering.