Tapping At Glass (Verve, 2023)

Praise

“‘Headlines fell from our mouths’: Tim Tim Cheng writes poems with the urgency of an elegy to freedom, pulsing with the electric shock of displacement. She is alert to the sudden strangeness of things, riffing from the now into rich veins of myth. These poems capture the tested bonds between friend and friend, between parent and child, between language and tongue. Tapping At Glass confirms her as one of a vital new generation of poets emerging from Hong Kong.”

—Sarah Howe


“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


“I am drawn to Tim Tim Cheng’s poems because they remind me of the power and beauty of honesty in writing. Each poem in Tapping At Glass is her shattered self. Dear readers, I urge you to handle them with care, because you are getting to know better a poet who has fearlessly shared the turbulence and threats that troubled her. It is never easy to write poetry in one’s second language, even more difficult it is to express one’s anxiety and burden towards her home city, and make herself understood and celebrated as a global anglophone poet. Tapping at Glass is a successful survival guide, not just for Cheng, but everyone in this imperfect world. ”

—Nicholas Wong