Book review: Tricia Tan’s Patient History a promising poetry debut on illness

Patient History

By Tricia Tan
Poetry/Ethos Books/Paperback/114 pages/$17.44/Books Kinokuniya

Gachapon machines, Pixar films and South Korean K-pop band BTS abound in the debut poetry collection of young doctor-poet Tricia Tan. It is an unusually upbeat and quirky aesthetic choice for a book that deals with her mother’s cancer diagnosis.

Abandoning the usual sombreness and gravity of the genre, Tan’s promising work turns to whimsy and sparkle to reckon with the fear of death, a thwarted sense of time conditioned by illness, and her double identity as both doctor and daughter.

There are some serious revelations here – even though they appear sugar-coated at first glance.

Tan’s lingo in this book is thoroughly digital and steeped in pop culture. Before the speaker’s mother goes under the knife, the speaker asks her mother how it felt to experience “this life in unbulleted / PowerPoint and unloaded image”.

Later on, a poem titled “explain like I’m five: ptsd” draws its form from a Reddit thread which offers layperson-friendly explanations.

Readers also get to play doctor and fill up poetic exercise sheets in this book interleaved with cut-out pages that riff on the idea of “patient history”, a medical term describing the method doctors use to gather information about a patient’s past and present condition.

These are, in essence, graphic poems that defamiliarise the sterile, top-down medical relationship – inviting the reader into an alternative world of poetic collaboration.

The best poems in this book move beyond their glossy references to unearth surprising images that marry levity and revelation – from “the tie-dyed placenta of setting sun” to “a streak of white Crayola metastasising into the clouds”.

Observing a medical scan, Tan writes in one of the collection’s most powerful images: “I look at every scan / tell myself it is a painting / the mass in her womb / a sun standing still in the sky.”

Hers is a ludic confessional style that will appeal, this reviewer suspects, to a generation of young readers who will find Tan’s approach playful and spirited.

It can, however, get saccharine at times in poems where the image accumulates a heady number of references to little focus – such as in the poem “stencilling the world: a time-lapse”.

This is largely a book with all the frills that could do with more regular moments of austerity, to advance the collection into a different emotional space.

As a first book, Patient History shows promise of lyrical acumen and a spirit of poetic experimentation. It is a book for those who want to find and invent their own language for talking about the taboo that is illness.

Rating: Four stars

If you like this, read: On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf (2022, $6.09, Amazon SG, go to

amzn.to/4eZrpwU

). A short essay by a great modernist writer, Woolf considers why illness – which is so central to human existence – has not been one of the great themes of literature. A beautiful companion read to Patient History.