An English poet from the Liverpool Cantonese borderlands — Jennifer Lee Tsai

Jennifer Lee Tsai, Kismet, Oxford: IgnitionPress, 2019, £3.00. ISBN 978-1-39165043-5-6

Born on Merseyside, Jennifer Lee Tsai grew up in Liverpool where she now lives midst the streets and buildings that populate her poems.

There is no way I could not like Jennifer Lee Tsai’s poetry, a poetry that rises like mist off the mingling tides of the rivers Mersey and Pearl. Her poetry is written out of lived experience, and so rings true. Its “Chineseness” seems natural, woven-in, not forced, not precious or ostentatious. But Tsai’s is above all a personal and ‘local’ poetry —in the best senses of both terms.