Beautiful prose and imagery. I thoroughly enjoyed each and every poem. Wonderfully written. Each poem drew you to the next.

Goddess is a smart, tightly knit chapbook of poems that is rich with longing, spiritual devotion, and queer desire. The poems feel like prayers, fragments of memories or dreams, and read like whispered incantations. This short collection reveals language’s role as signifier, shaping and reframing the narrative structures we build about ourselves and relationships to create meaning.

I was utterly charmed by this collection. I will be writing a longer review and will update with links when posted.

My thanks to Querencia Press for providing an advance copy for review.

DNF. It might be a bit of a language barrier, but it just didn't make a lot of sense to me. here are more words to make this over 100 characters long. twilight balance beam stars in the sky oh my

this lil chapbook packed a lot of power into 26 pages. I kept trying to pick a choice snippet to attach to this review, but every line is so ingrained in the whole that it didn't feel right. All the poems flirt with the line between sacred and profane. There's a whole lot of yearn, and this is the season for it, and i will come back to this again and again.

This is a very short collection of 10 poems with themes of spirituality and queerness. The writing is lovely but it wasn't something I particularly connected with.

"Perhaps in some foreign universe we could have been equals. Last night you were rain and I was famine, and you came when I cried out for you. Your words caught fire down my back, your smile was oil upon a clay alter. Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. Intimacy is a fountain that I drink from, your chest a hollow crevice where I yield."

3.5, rounded up.

Cheryl Tan's "goddess" shows a glimpse of what this prospective poet has to offer. Admittedly, it was a bit of an ebb and flow for me – I didn't click with every poem, especially upon first reading, but poetry is still somewhat of an unexplored field for me. "Fragments", "Goddess" (cited above), "Armenian Church, Singapore", and "Requiem" were the standouts for me. Tan shows strong handling of language and metaphor and I think she is a poet I'll circle back to in the future.

Having read the description of this chapbook, I felt inspired to read it despite not usually opting to read poetry, and with it being a short collection I didn’t feel intimidated to jump right in.

I thought the chapbook was beautifully written and I loved the religious imagery that was laced throughout.
Focusing on love and loss, it was vulnerable and heartbreaking, leaving me wanting to read more. Goddess was the stand out poem to me as it explored desire and unrequited love and portrayed a spectrum of emotion.

I will definitely be seeing what Tan does next.

I think Tan has a great way with words, I really liked the way the poems and prose are structured and how they are. Goddess is my favorite. I think the way the prose flow in that one is the best. It is a short but very nice collection of prose and poetry

Goddess is a well written poetry collection filled with love, religion, and using said religion as a lens of worship to one's lover. The poems Goddess and Requiem both stood out to me especially; Goddess was exactly what I wanted, when I found this book, and Requiem was a sort of climax you don't realize you're building to until it's too late.

I had a hard time parsing some of the poems fully, even when I read them over a few times -- whether intentionally or not, I couldn't say. Tan writes somewhat similarly to Richard Siken, where meaning is something you have to dig for, and analysis is a requisite to reading -- I wouldn't be surprised if he was, in fact, an influence in some manner.

The religious symbolism in reference to a partner is a writing trope I will never dislike -- and Tan uses it very well within this collection, writing something reverent and adoring.

Ultimately Goddess is a quick, good read, suited for when you have enough time to mull over poems. The ending did leave me with questions, but I do believe that was the point. I plan on coming back to this collection at some point in the future to reread it -- to see what I can gleam the second time around, and simply because it was a nice book.

Thanks to NetGalley and Querencia Press for the ARC!

Cheryl Tan’s "goddess" is a slight but sturdy chapbook—a sorbet, of sorts, that whets the appetite just enough for the reader to want more.

I remember reading an interview once where a Singaporean artist spoke about how the physical constraint of the island lent itself to art that was expansive and experimental. This idea resonates with "goddess."

It’s a bit difficult to find a center in such a brief chapbook, but it still pulls the reader into its orbit. Tan addresses sexuality, religion, and language, but she handles each subject with such a light touch that they seem almost feather-light. It feels like these poems need the context of a full collection in order for them to land with the force that moves just beneath their surface. They seem to desire conversation with each other, but Tan withholds it. The tension is wonderful.

“Padma” and “Fragments” are standout poems, but the line that burrowed into my brain originates in “honorary hollowscape”:

“can you count down to the moments when memory turns diegetic, the forcing of marrow of bone, ash out of body?”

I mean, wow.