"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 aa«aaa® [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 aa¼a±aaaºa¸a"a¶a· [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 will] show you how to think with a fabulist's casual outlandishness, how to find the universal in the miniscule, the mystic in the domestic...Through self-made fables, Tu fills in her background with equal doses of fiction and nonfiction, highflying conceit and grounded autobiography." -Literary Hub, Christopher Spaide, "7 Poetry Collections to Read This October"
"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. 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
