Melete by Jennifer Lee Tsai
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Bloodaxe Books
Published 21 May 2026
Jennifer Lee Tsai's first full-length collection explores family history, intergenerational trauma, love, loss and belonging through the perspective of a second-generation British Chinese identity. Named after one of the three original Boeotian Muses, the Muse of meditation and contemplation, this expansive book establishes a powerful lyric voice " interweaving narratives of memory, migration and mysticism across Liverpool, China and Hong Kong, dual cultures and heritages. Comprising three distinct sections, which brings together Lee Tsai's previous two pamphlets, Kismet and La Mystérique as well as new, uncollected work, Melete navigates personhood, subjectivity and the multitudes of the lyric 'I', transforming into states and places of spiritual transcendence and ecstasies. 'These extraordinary poems stage a reckoning " a woman refusing the labels imposed upon her and naming herself Melete, asserting her right to forge her own identity. They speak powerfully against exoticism, stereotyping, and the manifold forms of racism experienced by the Chinese in Britain. At the same time, they enact the Chinese tenet of ancestral veneration, animating the distinct presences of forebears and honouring the multiple roots - from China and within England itself " through which the speaker comes into being. This is a fierce and intelligent collection, threaded with moments of ars poetica, in which writing becomes a means of inscribing the self into voice.' " Hannah Lowe
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