Marylyn Tan
ISBN: 978-1-949099-23-2
38 pages


Unclench is by turns self-obsessed, self-referential, narcissistic, plain-spoken, too oblique, mawkish and wallowing. It is the poetic equivalent of sniffing your long-gone ex’s underwear and bursting into tears. It is an exercise in layering queer cross-continental heartbreak over itself while also thinking about the nature of thwarted desire, compulsive habits, and unhealthy attachment styles. For the Singaporean student travelling to London, it is a road long-weary and over-trodden, due in large part both to colonial hungover dreams and the continued pathetic framing of everything Western as International and affording status and prestige. Most of Unclench was written in an exercise called ‘morning pages’, whereby one writes for 20 minutes without stopping, every morning, before the inner editor has had a chance to awaken, at the behest of a poet friend who wanted a buddy to do this exercise with. As with many things, the poet friend stopped doing it after four days, and I continued, trying my best to draw out the poisonous tail of regret that had lodged in my heart, one autumn in London, still heartbroken about something that happened twenty four months ago, still too young, yet not young enough to know everything.

Unclench would love to not be like other volumes of poetry written in four months on an exchange semester in a strange-familiar country but may unfortunately still be a disappointment to you. On one hand, Unclench is a long idiot gibber about losing the one person in the world who can still rein you in. On the other, it is a series of quick sketches with a half-awake hand of social contradictions, getting off and getting on on unequal footing, and attempts to mute the destructive thought process. It is a first step towards repairing a broken narrative of the self. It is fuelled by spite and sponsored by a need to return the self back to the self. It is waiting for you.