Overview

""A blazing display of bravura and bravado . . . each of [Tu's] utterances [is] a lesson in runic risk."" -ko ko thett, poet and translator Selected by Ng Yi-Sheng as the winner of the 2024 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize. Born out of a myriad of griefs in the wake of Myanmar's violent return to military rule, Fablemaker alchemizes the pains of a fractured life into heart song. On February 1, 2021, Myanmar's military staged a coup d'etat, imprisoning the country's democratically elected leaders and declaring a state of emergency. In response, the people of Myanmar sustained ongoing protest acts in full defiance the military. Mandy Moe Pwint Tu's debut, Fablemaker, written during the Spring Revolution, weaves together a troubled familial history and a national reckoning. The collection follows the speaker as she contends with her father's untimely death, her country's crisis, and her de facto exile to the United States. Wrought with tenderness, the poems bear witness to loss, rage, grief, and love-and the fables she created to survive it all. Through Burmese folklore, formal invention, and addresses to a ""dear fellow fablemaker,"" Tu strives to imagine a self and a world that, after their devastation, recover.

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9781958652183

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Reviews

""Above the miasmata of a military milieu, Mandy Moe Pwint Tu is a sybil possessed with grief. Homesick for a sick home, she invokes the lore of the land. She laces into her incompetent hosts and omnipresent ghosts. In a blazing display of ပါရမီ [bravura and bravado], she gently coaches us through a transgenerational trauma. Each of her utterances a lesson-in runic risk. Not every first monsoon promises မြေသင်းနံ့ [petrichor]. Fablemaker absolutely does.""-ko ko thett, Bamboophobia ""A personal poetic document of the complexities of resistance and cultural identities, memory, and mythologies...An urgent, arresting collection that deftly captures and transforms the challenge of reclaiming one's narrative through an author's unerring eye.""-Maw Shein Win, Percussing the Thinking Jar ""Tu constructs a world where girls speak stars and a father's sadness grows into an ogre. While a fable centers on its moral, this collection grounds itself in hunger...I have never read a collection that so seamlessly weaves anti-colonial knowledge with the lyric and fantasy. Fablemaker is an absolute triumph of a debut, a formally imaginative work with a winding, bright voice.""-Taneum Bambrick, Intimacies, Received ""An instant classic for those familiar with the impossible question of home and the turbulent expanse between the self and what cannot be returned to. These are poems born in that space-somewhere between the vigorously fantastic and the most honest, tender intimacies.""-Steven Espada Dawson, Late to the Search Party ""A poet of precise image and language. These poems move with surprising grace through different geographies and human identities-daughter to a father, citizen in a time of political instability...A much-needed voice in the world today.""-Ajibola Tolase, 2000 Blacks ""Through brilliant imagination and impeccable craft, Fablemaker presents to us a tapestry of the mythical and material monsters that surround and sometimes inhabit us.""-Sean Bishop, The Night We're Not Sleeping In ""A voice that's intimate, yet eloquent; a style that's daring, embarking on playful experiments with form, but also musical and sensitive to rhythms, both fine and vast, returning again and again to the same obstinate motifs. It speaks from a familiar perspective-that of a foreign student, a daughter bearing the weight of her familial traumas-while at the same time illuminating the epic and turbulent history of Myanmar and our common postcolonial legacy. Though it's filled with the grief of our ruinous times, it still affirms the necessity of fablemaking, of artistic creation that we share as writers."" -Ng Yi-Sheng, winner of the Singapore Literature Prize

Author Information

Mandy Moe Pwint Tu is a pile of ginkgo leaves in a trench coat from Yangon, Myanmar. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, Beloit Poetry Journal, Porter House Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She has published three poetry chapbooks, Monsoon Daughter (Thirty West Publishing House, 2022), Unsprung (Newfound, 2023), and Burma Girl (Gold Line Press, 2026). She received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.

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