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Mary Jean Chan, Fleche – review

Mary Jean Chan’s Flèche describes the speaker’s struggle to assert her gay sexual orientation despite social prejudice and her mother’s horror. This story is interwoven with themes of cultural change and intercultural migration as the poet travels from Hong Kong to America and England. The whole book is framed by metaphors drawn from the sport of fencing – flèche itself and the section titles ‘Parry’, ‘Riposte’ and ‘Corps-à-Corps’. A more deeply imagined inner structure lies in a series of accounts of eating, drinking and cooking that runs through it, and particularly in an implicit parallel between Chan’s gnawing erotic need … Continue Reading