“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, poet and translator, Bamboophobia

“Mandy Moe Pwint Tu’s striking new poetry collection, Fablemaker, is a personal poetic document of the complexities of resistance and cultural identities, memory, and mythologies. As a poet and as a daughter of Burmese parents, the author uses the fable as a vehicle for understanding both trauma and healing. Her skillful use of a variety of forms including the yuzana, a Burmese poetic form, and richly visual language resonates with energy and meaning. Fablemaker is 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, author, Percussing the Thinking Jar

“In her debut poetry collection, Fablemaker, Mandy Tu constructs a world where girls speak stars and a father’s sadness grows into an ogre. To live in this frozen forest is to befriend trees, to beg the sounds ribbiting out of the water. While a fable centers on its moral, this collection grounds itself in hunger: “What a thing to tell the hungry, that turns are to be waited for.” The university recruiter has pebbles for eyes. The speaker pays bags of gold to show the west that her country is burning. 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, poet, Intimacies, Received


“Tu’s Fablemaker is 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. There’s much to praise and learn from here: surprising image, startling linework, every ending a mic-drop—all working toward a clearer picture of belonging, when ‘all you know is how to leave.’ There’s no one else doing it like Mandy Moe Pwint Tu.”
—Steven Espada Dawson, author, Late to the Search Party

“Mandy Moe Pwint Tu is 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. The close look at the evolution of relationships with countries of birth and residence, parents, and loss establishes Mandy as a voice well versed in the human and material cost of navigating the complexities of these relationships. A much-needed voice in the world today.”
—Ajibola Tolase, author, 2000 Blacks

“Mandy Moe Pwint Tu’s Fablemaker is a book that teems with the fantastic—ogres, nagas, garudas, princesses, sentient shadows, and sun-eating dogs—yet somehow it’s also a fearless, poignant, and utterly real exploration of personal and political struggle. By mixing documentary and lyric-narrative modes, Tu weaves the fabular with the factual to elucidate Myanmar’s military coup and the repression that has followed, the life and death of her troubled father, and her own life as a Burmese immigrant in an increasingly xenophobic country. Through brilliant imagination and impeccable craft, Fablemaker presents to us a tapestry of the mythical and material monsters that surround and sometimes inhabit us, but that we often fail to acknowledge or perceive.”
—Sean Bishop, author, The Night We're Not Sleeping In

“This is a collection that ticks every box for me, that fires on all cylinders. It’s got 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 illuminating the epic and turbulent history of Myanmar and our common postcolonial legacy. And 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, author of Lion City and last boy, winner of the Singapore Literature Prize