Fablemaker by Mandy Moe Pwint Tu

“A blazing display of bravura and bravado . . . each of [Tu’s] utterances [is] a lesson in runic risk.” —ko ko thett, poet and translator

Selected by Ng Yi-Sheng as the winner of the 2024 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize.

**Born out of a myriad of griefs in the wake of Myanmar’s violent return to military rule, *Fablemaker* alchemizes the pains of a fractured life into heart song. **

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.

Mandy Moe Pwint Tu is a pile of ginkgo leaves in a trench coat from Yangon, Myanmar. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, Beloit Poetry Journal, Porter House Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She has published three poetry chapbooks, Monsoon Daughter (Thirty West Publishing House, 2022), Unsprung (Newfound, 2023), and Burma Girl (Gold Line Press, 2026). She received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.