Tim Tim Cheng – författare

Tapping At Glass charts girlhood, multilingualism, and psychogeography from Hong Kong to Scotland. Myths, meditations on the arts and mass media, and migration stories entwine. Through protest-stricken urban spaces, love hotels, farming as activism, frog watching, alternative therapies, and seascapes where racial and social memories flow in all directions, the working class subjects in Cheng''s poems reflect on what it means to exist in one locale and dream of elsewhere, where the past and future, interconnectedness and othering, are in perpetual negotiation. Tapping into various moods, Cheng''s poems question the making of a self and a city, and the languages one uses to translate microhistories.Tapping At Glass is Tim Tim''s debut pamphlet collection."Tim Tim Cheng is a wonderful new voice in the poetry landscape. Playful, serious, complicating any attempt to pin her down – even in the short span of a pamphlet she dances through images and ideas. Already so accomplished, she is definitely a poet who is going places." – Niall Campbell

Featuring both established and emerging Hong Kong poets across generations and continents, this unique anthology offers a glimpse into an exciting, diverse range of voices that make up the diasporic imagination of the contemporary Hong Kong poetry community. Adopting a diasporic approach, the anthology encompasses both native Hong Kong writers as well as expatriate and mixed-race voices who were born or have lived in the city.With a preface from the Hong Kong-born, California-based poet Marilyn Chin and a joint introduction from the co-editors, the anthology sheds light on some poignant, wide-ranging themes such as migration, identity, gender, language, belonging, environment that underpin the city of Hong Kong, a place situated uniquely between the East and the West, in the 21st century. The book also features a selection of artworks from some of Hong Kong''s most talented artists, inviting the reader to make connections between the visual images and the text.

“I moved to a country called writing” declares Tim Tim Cheng in this striking debut collection. The Tattoo Collector explores family history, displacement, politics, protest, and, as it moves between East and West, the uses of language to illustrate and interrogate what lies in between. As these poems range from Hong Kong, Scotland, and London, they unravel the relationship between the body, ecology and class with precise and haunting tenderness.Here, in Cheng’s illuminating and needle-sharp poems, the tattoo is a narrative, the body a radical means of expression. In states of flux, between resisting and belonging, we enter museums, hospitals, graveyards, and gigs. These intimate and polyphonic poems invite us to be troubled and enthralled by exhibits and the stories they have to tell, to look inside the glass box and study what is on display. Close-up, the poems bring into the daylight details that can be seen skin-deep on the surface, as well as those which point to another meaning, inked indelibly, beneath.