Some pithy ancient probably once said something along the lines of “You do not have to understand something to recognise its beauty” and, in quoting this fictional philosophising offspring of my own creation, I have succinctly captured my thoughts on ‘Bestiary’, the debut novel from poet K-Ming Chan.

I didn’t understand much of it. But, golly, was it a beauty!

It is a dazzling, fabulist inter-generational story of mothers and daughters, migration, trauma, loss, bodies, queer love and beasts. Chang reinvents the diasporic narrative of Asians (in this case, Taiwanese) moving to America, as a dizzying, esoteric, polyphonic chimera, a tale full of girls sprouting tiger tails, gay pirates birthing babies from crabs, blood geese, floating fathers and a veritable smorgasbord of farts, assholes and amputated toes. It is utterly bizarre and I was regularly lost wading amidst all the allegory, myth and metamorphic symbolism.

However, Chang’s prose is majestically electric- she uses words so fragrantly, splashing imagery on the page as if metaphors and personification were paint in a Jackson Pollock painting. Her sentences are often so sumptuous, you want to climb inside them and nestle in their splendour. Did I understand what was going on most of the time? Absolutely not! Did I lap up the surreality anyway? Mostly. Spellbinding and visceral though the semantic magic was, I do tend to prefer a narrative a little less abstract, a story a little less like a cryptic crossword

That being said, I enjoyed learning a little more about Taiwanese mythology and I am in awe of K-Ming Chang’s language and can’t wait to see what she conjures up next!