Melete

Jennifer Lee Tsai’s first full-length collection explores family history, intergenerational trauma, love, loss and belonging through the perspective of a second-generation British Chinese identity. Named after one of the three original Boeotian Muses, the Muse of meditation and contemplation, this expansive book establishes a powerful lyric voice – interweaving narratives of memory, migration and mysticism across Liverpool, China and Hong Kong, dual cultures and heritages. Comprising three distinct sections, which brings together Lee Tsai’s previous two pamphlets, Kismet and La Mystérique as well as new, uncollected work, Melete navigates personhood, subjectivity and the multitudes of the lyric ‘I’, transforming into states and places of spiritual transcendence and ecstasies.

Jennifer Lee Tsai is a poet, writer and artist. Born in Bebington on the Wirral, she grew up in Liverpool. She has published two pamphlets, Kismet (ignitionpress, 2019) and La Mystérique (Guillemot Press, 2022), with her first book-length collection, Melete, published by Bloodaxe in 2026. A fellow of The Complete Works and a Ledbury Poetry Critic, she has received a Northern Writers Award for Poetry and is a winner of the Rebecca Swift Foundation’s Women Poets’ Prize. She has worked as a teacher of English to students in universities and colleges as well as within community settings. She is the recipient of an AHRC doctoral scholarship in Creative Writing at the University of Liverpool and an Artist in Residence at the Bluecoat’s studios through the Wittenham Bursary. Her poetry, essays and reviews have been published in publications including The Guardian, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Telegraph, The TLS and The White Review as well as on BBC Radio 4.