Cecilia Tan

Cecilia Tan is a poet living in the Netherlands. She writes what she cannot say out loud — and the whole craft of it, for her, is finding the most honest shape for a feeling too large to hold in the mouth. She is the mother of a daughter, Emma, whose voice runs through the work like a counter-melody — calling across gardens, running ahead through fields of tulips. The poems of Love’s Reckoning were written in the evenings, in the hour after her daughter sleeps, in what she calls “the dark I write in”: not metaphor, but the time when a line can be truer than a conversation. Her work moves in the tradition of Shakespeare — verse, soliloquy, and the staged word. The collection gathered here is organised as a reckoning: the bloom, the kingdom, the light changing, and the aftermath. It includes the title poem “The Demolition of Love,” the five-act tragedy of the same name, and Hamlet Reimagined — five soliloquies of Gijsbert, Prince of Almere. Some of these poems are tender. Some are accusations. Some are forgiveness. They are all true at once. They are offered not as a monument to grief, but as proof that a woman can be demolished and still remain — still becoming, still unfinished, still reaching toward the sky.