“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.