Cover designed by Alban Fischer
“Chan’s unique moon’s-eye view, encompassing multiple cultures, periods, and vantages, makes for a resonant debut.”
"This debut tenderly articulates the intersection of cultural history, the loneliness of migration, and the generosity of familial love."
"Marianne Chan's brilliant debut collection All Heathens masterfully develops themes of identity and the long-term effects of colonization."
―"Favorite Poetry Collections of 2020," Largehearted Boy
"[Chan] considers how the erasure and realignment of an individual's identity, and an entire people's history, creates shockwaves that affect generations both in the Philippines and around the world. Chan's mournful poems are brimming with longing and anger and redemption as she takes control of her own story and of Filipino history."
—Booklist
"In All Heathens, Marianne Chan weaves history with personal narrative to map the heart of the Filipino and Filipino American global community. Despite the many distances, there is enduring kinship across the time and space of the diaspora: 'Around the world, we are the same people,' she writes. 'We have merely moved our feet.' And whether reimagining the origin story of Eve, charting the arrival of Ferdinand Magellan in the Philippines, or narrating her own memories, Chan proves that history is not static, but rather a living home."
—Poets & Writers, "10 Questions for Marianne Chan"
"Chan’s poetic world admits the confusion of her particular existence: for Chan, context, place, and placement have never been sure, or easy. Having grown up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan, the poet is as much European as she is American, as much American as she is Filipino. Or is she somewhere in between? Maybe it’s complicated, as Rick Barot suggests in his praise of All Heathens, but Chan’s poetry makes it all seem so clear; we’re going around in circles, but there’s always the surety of the ground beneath our feet."
―"Resistance Against Erasure: Talking with Marianne Chan," Rumpus
"All Heathens unveils a circulatory universe of family lineage, identity contexts, and feminine becoming. The lines intersecting this collection are infinite. . . All Heathens is a spinning vortex, shaking out new beginnings, new possibilities, new ifs, to create, try on, and live by, with each turn."
—"Disrupting the Colonial Lens,” Atticus Review
"Catholicism, colonialism, and karaoke: these subjects, along with poems dedicated to Antonio Pigafetta and jet lag, are at the center of Marianne Chan’s debut poetry collection. Chen Chen writes, 'Alive on every page, this book is a song that refuses to sing of anything less than the true, the piercing and true.'"
—“20 New Asian American Books to Read Right Now," Electric Literature
"Chan has created a collection that is as irreverent as it is sacred, that offers sadness and laughter and death and bright, bright truth; it is a compass for a new kind of voyaging."
—The Arkansas International
"[An] ambitious debut collection."
—"Poetry for the Rest of Us: 2020 Roundup," Ms. Magazine
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Winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) 2021 New Writers Award
Winner of the 2021 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry
Winner of the 2022 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Outstanding Achievement
Longlist Finalist for the 2020 Julie Suk Award in Poetry
Poets & Writers, “Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin”
CLMP, “A Reading List for Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month and Beyond”
Electric Literature, “20 New Asian American Books to Read Right Now”
Largehearted Boy, "Favorite Poetry Collections of 2020"
All Heathens is a declaration of ownership—of bodies, of histories, of time. Revisiting Magellan’s voyage around the world, Marianne Chan navigates her Filipino heritage by grappling with notions of diaspora, circumnavigation, and discovery. Whether rewriting the origin story of Eve (“I always imagined that the serpent had the legs of a seductive woman in black nylons”), or ruminating on what-should-have-been-said “when the man at the party said he wanted to own a Filipino,” Chan paints wry, witty renderings of anecdotal and folkloric histories, while both preserving and unveiling a self that dares any other to try and claim it.