Poetry Pamphlet

Bitter Melon 苦瓜, September 2019

Paperback, 20 pages

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**Shortlisted for the 2019 Saltire-Calum MacDonald Award**

 

Like white dresses fluttering in the wind, this hallucinatory poem moves between reconfigurations of the Crusades, the myth of St George and the Dragon, and the role of art as protest for global bodily autonomy. Difficult and formally engaging, Wedding Beasts is a dizzying exploration of violent traditions and queer worship.

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REVIEWS

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'In Wedding Beasts Jay G Ying gives us a long piece about love and loss and hope and how language can and must respond to these things in exquisite lines that are at once personal and universal.'

Ian McMillan in The North

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'The omens Ying presents us with illustrate and anchor the slippage of time the poet deploys. Space and time clamber over each other, the memories of temporally distant years no longer positionally distant.'

Ali Graham in Tenebrae

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'His words open fresh paths back and forwards through time, and give forms of holding to previously ignored and disregarded materials.'

Alice Hiller in Harana Poetry

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'Jay G. Ying’s Wedding Beasts recasts the legend of St George as a hallucinatory prose poem of love and draconic grief.'

Camille Ralphs in Times Literary Supplement

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'Wedding Beasts carries the reader on a journey through so much grief, conflict and finality, addressing personal and societal structures and spaces in attempts to find or make a semblance of meaning from it all.'

Shehzar Doja in SPAM