‘The woman writes as if the Devil was in her; and that is the only condition under which a woman writes anything worth reading.’ Cadence Chung’s first full-length poetry collection, Mad Diva, is epigraphed with this quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne, before it invites readers into its tempestuous theatre.

The collection, structured like a two-act opera, uses the dramatic form as a vessel to capture beauty, romance, and meaning. The first section, ‘The opera house’, is a performance of the self appearing as a tableau of scenes, full of lush descriptions of nights spent chasing down fevered desires – ‘a white-cold-burning caress... you beat down with tiny hammers into your sinew until you find it in every touch and every sleuth of hot blood that sits, waiting, in your lips’.

The poetic voice used throughout, the mad diva of the title, is desperate to feel the full intensity of her lived experience, while at the same time conscious of immortalising life through art. The crux of her show is being a performer craving the ephemeral, but so aware of the need to preserve it that staying present becomes impossible. She acknowledges the moral ambiguity of existing this way, but does so with a touch of playfulness, balancing conviction with a sense of humour. In ‘Three Witches’, she muses:

They say all poetry is about Love, Death,
and Time. What a horrible thing a poet is
writing about these instead of living
them, deep inside a lover thinking about
what a sensual poem it’ll make.

With several poems named after the women of canonical epics – Scherazade, Lucia, Salomé – Chung pays tribute to the divas before her, trying on their various personas for size, reflecting their mystique, and calling on them to join in the chorus of her own life. In ‘Carmen,’ the performer recalls being stabbed on stage and saved by the thickness of their corset:

I sang the Habanera
like a bat out of hell that night. When, backstage,
I peeled my costume away and everyone saw
the blood, they asked why I didn’t just
call the whole thing off. To me it was no worse
than when I’d nick myself shaving
my dainty little thighs.

Shaving is an extension of the performer's search for beauty, and a form of self-discovery; tracing one’s outline to sharpen the edges into focus. It is also an act of thrilling recklessness, drawing a self-portrait with a knife’s edge, always on the cusp of an accidental cut which will reveal the unbearable substance underneath.

The second section of the text, ‘The madness’, uncovers reality – the bloodied artist – when the show is over. Where ‘The opera house’ relishes in surface tensions, this section is laden with intimate depth, stripping back idealism to seek the person behind the performance. In ‘Perfume’ the voice laments:

The poets betrayed me — I thought they’d all read
the Greeks, but turns out it was only Dickinson.
All her em dashes like bleeding mouths on the page,
itching to say something more — cutting their own
teeth for their fizz of calcium.

Aligning herself with Dickinson, another poet whose personal myth looms as large as her craft, the diva considers how writing self-truths into poetry can feel like a self-inflicted wound. Her efforts to turn her life into art are so committed it becomes cannibalistic. Still, she's unselfconscious in exposing her authenticity, generously allowing us to see her divine and grotesque interiority. The persona that emerges is therefore beguiling, tragic and exalted.

Chung is formidable in this debut, as much in the dexterity of their pen and breadth of their artistry, as in their unflinching quest for the sublime. Rising to the challenge of Hawthorne’s statement, she offers us a modern epic – one in which the mad diva makes no apologies for her extravagance, for surrendering to the performance. She pulls you in with her siren song and hits every note with full confidence, her indulgence a spectacle we’ll always pay to see.

Reviewed by Melanie Kwang