Gaudy Boy, paperback
Publication Date: September 1, 2025
Publisher Marketing: On February 1, 2021, Myanmar's military staged a coup d'etat, imprisoning the country's democratically elected leaders and declaring a state of emergency. Written during the Spring Revolution, when the people of Myanmar sustained ongoing protest acts in full defiance of the military, Mandy Moe Pwint Tu's debut, Fablemaker, weaves together a troubled familial history and a national reckoning. The poetry collection follows the speaker as she contends with her father's untimely death, her country's violent return to military rule, and her effective exile to the United States.
Exploring themes of loss, grief, belonging, and hope, the poems grapple with a seemingly endless well of rage for the systems that failed the speaker's father and her country—and the fables she created to survive it all. At the heart of Fablemaker is imaginative necessity. Through Burmese folktales, formal invention, and addresses to a "dear fellow fablemaker," Tu's poems utilize the speculative to alchemize the pains of a fractured life into something hopeful, imagining a world that, after its burning, recovers.
