Tammy Lai-Ming Ho – författare

If I Do Not Reply is the first UK collection by Hong Kong poet Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, and brings us a welcome new voice to speak of matters in a place too often seen through expatriate, rather than native eyes. Hong Kong may once have been a borrowed place, on borrowed time, situated physically in one world, and mentally somewhere between two, but its current uncomfortable position finds an apt chronicler here."A unique poetic testament of life in and out of Hong Kong between 2019 and 2022, spanning the Covid epidemic, and unrelentingly outspoken and courageous in defence of human freedoms facing systemic repression. Yet subject matter isn't all. Gifted in every aspect of her poetic craft. Tammy Lai-Ming Ho is witty, clever, passionate - and acutely observant of the inner life. Although written with a Hong Kong sensibility, these poems transcend contemporality and location. They map our times: all our times." -Richard Berengarten

This Pivot examines a body of contemporary neo-Victorian novels whose uneasy relationship with the past can be theorised in terms of aggressive eating, including cannibalism. Not only is the imagery of eating repeatedly used by critics to comprehend neo-Victorian literature, the theme of cannibalism itself also appears overtly or implicitly in a number of the novels and their Victorian prototypes, thereby mirroring the cannibalistic relationship between the contemporary and the Victorian. Tammy Lai-Ming Ho argues that aggressive eating or cannibalism can be seen as a pathological and defining characteristic of neo-Victorian fiction, demonstrating how cannibalism provides a framework for understanding the genre’s origin, its conflicted, ambivalent and violent relationship with its Victorian predecessors and the grotesque and gothic effects that it generates in its fiction.