The Tattoo Collector (2024)

Praise

“Each poem in The Tattoo Collector is finely conceived and edited into a morsel of acute nourishment; and we didn’t know how hungry we were, as readers. Words and characters are flying fish and inky needles. As language glints and travels, we find new stories and understandings making shuddering interfaces with our skin. We’re changed as we read, marked, pierced, aroused. Tim Tim Cheng guides us through the political and personal, land and water, stylish use of language and the bigger risks of love. The poet is an original yet a storyteller of place and family; a rebel both generous and shy.”

—Anthony Vahni Capildeo


“Tim Tim Cheng’s The Tattoo Collector is an incredible debut. I was blown away by its breadth and precision of feeling / phrasing. It pays as close to the linguistic whirl of “all that grammar and glimmer” as it does to rescuing familial and political memory. It captures how phrases, like people, break, stutter, and start again. And though it realises that “being understood will not save us”, it extends our sense of who “us” is and, in doing so, achieves something hard and redemptive.”

—Will Harris


“Tim Tim’s urgent and taut poems articulate the structures we are born to, bound by, and spend a life breaking free from. The Tattoo Collector digs under the artifice of skin, language and even country to recover and define the self, before looking outward, asking “Why do I still believe—like a stranger— / that being understood could save us?” In spare and unrelenting language, these haunting poems explore the journey to—and cost of—chasing that understanding. This is a necessary and vital collection, one that articulates the experience of so many of us.”

—Marjorie Lotfi