Marylyn Tan | Glass Poetry Press

Marylyn Tan (Unclench) is a queer, female, Chinese Singaporean, linguistics graduate, writer and artist. Her first volume of poetry, GAZE BACK, published by Ethos Books and acquired in North America by Georgia Review, is the lesbo Singaporean trans-genre witch grimoire you never knew you needed. GAZE BACK was shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Awards in 2019 and made Marylyn the first woman in history to win the Singapore Literature Prize for poetry in 2020, the nation’s most prestigious and longest-running literary award. Her work addresses the body, queerness, and the conditions of alienation and marginalisation, through trading in the conventionally obscene and radically pleasurable, often drawing from themes of the occult and esoteric.

Spoken word poetry was where my poetry first garnered an audience. I started performing in 2013, and the first time I insinuated I ate p**** onstage set me on a journey that never really stopped being about pushing various envelopes, especially in Singapore, where you're lucky to get away with anything you do.

— Interview with Marylyn Tan, University of Oxford