"The Tattoo Collector" by Tim Tim Cheng (Nine Arches Press, 2024)

Poems from Poetry London, Poetry, PN Review, The Rialto, London Magazine etc. - an impressive list though the first poem isn't promising. The notes (2.5 pages) are useful - almost necessary.

• The title poem's good.
• "Skin. Me" ends with "Here, the more marked you are the easier it is to identify// you".
• "Why do I still believe - like a stranger -/ that being understood could save us" (p.19)
• p.26 doesn't work for me
• "Here's to shadows now statues" (p.29)
• p.32 seems light
• I like "Deluge"
• "Future Perfect" (1.5 pages, no paragraph breaks) is mostly grey text, some in italics. Lots of blocks are repeated. The scattered letters in black text spell "I place a few ill thoughts below my nose smell their silicone my mother my mother turn teal grips me like time spare me spare my needs". I bailed out early.
• "Florence and the Machine" has gaps between words, not all of which replace punctuation. I like parts of it - "longing is guttural/ instants scramble / out of my throat / werewolves dash across tundras / to shudder // in the bathwater / the best chorus is/ just a cry".

Section III (starting at p.68) is a much easier read - I think I can mostly understand what the poet's trying to do and the layouts have less variety (a good thing, because I didn't understand many of the earlier layouts - variety for variety's sake?), though p.77-80 is a lapse.

Other reviews

• Michelle Suen (From these epigraphs, we might identify each section’s main theme (in the order of their appearance) as empathy, history, and rebellion, even though Cheng’s poems interlock across section frames in time, place, question, and form. ... Across the spatiotemporal spectrum of lived experiences, The Tattoo Collector narrates a sonic, rhythmic chain of historical dispossession and magical resistance ... et us transpose the art of tattooage to that of translation. Tattoos translate at the border between flesh and air, transforming shifting images into the intransigent language of bodily permanence, “the different strengths between / bold clouds searing across my ribs”. Tattoos negotiate the tensions latent in the dualities of source language and target language, outer and inner, and other metaphorical binaries)
• Emma Lee (Cheng’s concerns are justice and cohesion, how language is used to shore up colonialism and silence dissent. Her poems show how those traditionally silenced might use their language and voices to retranslate their histories and understand themselves)