Math Paper Press

Change is what happens to everything: history is humanity's attempt to make sense of this inevitability. In his debut collection of poetry, Daryl Lim Wei Jie paints minute strokes that give way to panoramas, strewn with unusual asides: migrants crossing oceans; an ancient king reclaiming a throne; rivers clogged with corpses; the paperwork for an invasion; a milo dinosaur the height of Mount Everest. A Book of Changes is a young poet's attempt to make sense of the impossible ebb and flow of time.

In 2003, a young woman leaves home without telling her family that she is not coming back. She spends the next six years moving from house to house and living hand-to- mouth; at first with her lover, and then alone.

And The Walls Come Crumbling Down parallels three events in the author’s life: the physical deterioration of the house in which she lives, the emotional disintegration of a couple once in love, and the unearthing of childhood ghosts that can’t seem to be cast off. Part memoir and part poetic rumination, it is an ode to love, loss and the people and places we call home.

In a lasting marriage, one could still outlive the other. A poet gazes upon his older partner, pondering the inevitable. Panic, heartache, and a surprising sense of acceptance, interwoven with instances of joyful resilience, punctuate the ordinariness of their everyday lives and occupy these poems about same-sex love, death, and the fragile art of testimony.

A Luxury: Omnibus Edition is simultaneously a time capsule and a time-machine. The first volume, A Luxury We Cannot Afford, bottled the lightning of poetry, prose and plays in 2015. The second, A Luxury We Must Afford, took a leap forward into the unknown future of Singapore. You will find something to please and pique every reader in this anthology.

SATORI BLUES 
by Cyril Wong  
published by Math Paper Press

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Cyril Wong’s longest and only Zen-inspired poem to date, Satori Blues is a response to writings by teachers of Buddhism and post-Buddhist philosophies. Composed as a stream of thought—at times epigrammatic, philosophical, fragmented, even exclamatory—the poem has been described by The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English as ‘a sustained meditation that recalls turn-of-the- century Geoffrey Hill in its intricately patterned probing.’

ONEIROS

by Cyril Wong
published by Math Paper Press

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Cyril Wong's eighth collection hurls the reader into a private dream world; these dreams explore the finitude of the self, recasting the poet's past and shaping the future or daring to mine its dangerous potential. 

AFTERIMAGE
by Werner Kho
published by Math Paper Press

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Afterimage: an image that continues to appear even after the original has ceased. Werner Kho’s debut poetry collection is both personal and yet universal, an exploration of the process of loss and how they come back to us in every different angle.

ARIA AND TRUMPET FLOURISH
by Rodrigo Dela Peña, Jr.
published by Math Paper Press

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In a world inundated by all kinds of texts that can be scanned almost as soon as they’re produced, and that as quickly shimmer away into oblivion, I am overjoyed to sit and read Rodrigo Dela Peña, Jr.’s much anticipated first full-length collection Aria and Trumpet Flourish.

Even while observing the necessary ceremonies that we must accord our living, the poet never forgets “time’s swift tumble,” the “tar-spackled road” or its “hairline cracks.” Unlike the ostentatious noise made by certain kinds of musical and other fanfare, the voice in these poems sings always out of a sense of urgency underwritten by love.

In this collection marked by masterful clarity and dexterous handling of forms (including ghazals, villanelles, abecedarians, and epistolaries), we glimpse monks walking the roads, crowds in the hellish circle of an MRT station at the end of the day, and the ghost of Jose Rizal in the Singapore Botanic Gardens. The poet recalls boyhood breakfasts fortified with bile and innards; and, for all his wandering, turns again and again to little towns and dusty barrios with homely names where a jukebox plays in a noodle shop called Tres Hermanas. He promises us: “This is my devotion: to account for the world’s bounty, its finite grace.// To exalt the flourishing it contains, to ache for what is taken away” (from “Compline”).

These are poems I will want to accompany me through the ordinary and other emergencies of everyday life; through the rest of the year, and beyond. In them, I might hope to learn more about the chrysalis’ secret—how, from its gold wreck of discarded laments, a dying self might help to birth a new one.

- Luisa A. Igloria, author of The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2018); Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (Utah State University Press, 2014); Juan Luna’s Revolver (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), and other books

CAPITAL MISFITS 
by Julie Koh
published by Math Paper Press

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A capsule collection of surreal short stories from one of Australia's rising stars.

A woman arrives on the seventh level of Heaven, only to realise it is a trading floor where the dead swap their karma before rebirth. In a Sydney laboratory, a vagrant participates in cosmeceutical trials in return for a Rolex watch. On an island made out of sugar, a student questions the rule of the benevolent Sugar Daddy. At an open mic night in New York, a zen poet takes the stage and begins to tell the greatest, most devastating joke in the world. In this blackly funny parallel universe, Koh explores the absurdity of a world in which the market has become God.

This special edition of Capital Misfits is illustrated by award-winning New York-based artist, Matt Huynh. 

A TREE TO TAKE US UP TO HEAVEN
by Jordan Melic
published by Math Paper Press

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Kueny isn’t much of a worrier, except maybe when it comes to her father, the Custodian of a Thousand Generations, whose soul is hanging by a thread. But when her brother, Ah Ti, inherits the throne and smashes the Watercress Elixir that preserves her family’s heavenly reign, her worries take on a whole new dimension.

Left with no choice, the siblings set out in search of a new home, embarking on a perilous journey that takes them through 14th century Majapahit and 19th century Malaya, where they encounter a dreamy prince who promises them the world, and end up in a sparkling city that will consume everything they know.

A mix of mythology, history and adventure—think Journey to the West meets Huckleberry Finn—Ah Ti and Kueny’s story is about growing up and finding a place for oneself in the world. It is also a story of Singapore, different from the one commonly told—an attempt to capture a sense of the fullness of time contained in the land and its people.

ALES FROM A TINY ROOM (2ND PRINTING)
by Wayne Rée
published by Math Paper Press

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Two gods sit on a park bench and compare universes. A woman has to find herself after discovering she’s an unwanted clone. A man changes with every city he’s in. An ancient beast hunts a very real monster.

Fourteen stories, taking you from the everyday to the extraordinary. These are the Tales From a Tiny Room.

SIKIT-SKIT LAMA-LAMA JADI BUKIT
by Annaliza Bakri
published by Math Paper Press

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When physical spaces make way for development, we risk historical amnesia. A place evokes a sense of belonging. It sustains our memory of who we are and where we are in the ebb and flow of humanity. Once lost, it can never be recovered. A person emptied of memory is one floating in an open sea without any anchor.

This anthology revisits lost places in Singapore. But not to reminisce or to evoke nostalgia. These poems express what these places mean to the poets and people who built this nation. They interweave social narratives with a strong desire to combat the loss of our memories, names, buildings, roads, trails, episodes, incidents, everything that is us and ours. They represent hope: of what was then, what we are, and what we can be.

Thought-provoking yet moving, these poems are the hidden gems of our literary tradition, unveiling a piece of our social tapestry with every turn of the page: a shared journey in which one rediscovers a lost fabric of our interwoven history. 

This anthology features award-winning poets such as Cultural Medallion recipients — Mohamed Latiff Mohamed and Suratman Makasan, accomplished poet-painters like Abdul Ghani Hamid and Suraidi Sipan, our brilliant Sufi poet — Johar Buang, as well as young talents such as Zulfadli Rashid and Noorhaqmal Mohamed Noor. Our acclaimed female poets Hadijah Rahmat, Amanah Mustafi and Kamaria Buang, also illuminate this poetic journey. These voices have been nothing but enlightening and empowering as they bear witness to the challenges and concerns of the people in the midst of change and transformation.

THE MONSTERS BETWEEN US
poems by Jason Wee
published by Math Paper Press

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In his debut poetry collection, Jason Wee returns to ‘1987’, the installation work he first introduced to art audiences at the first Singapore Biennale in 2006.

The monsters Wee renders are present creatures, some cruelly alive, each shadowed by a long tail of mastery and mortality. With interlocking sequences, Wee shifts from Grimm’s stories to the small frail species among us, arriving at the volume’s central sequence, “Unreliable Evidence”. Composed from newsprint, detainee reports, speech transcripts and redacted accounts, this bravura sequence is suffused with the songs of childhood and the anger of unaccounted injustices. We watch and listen to a voice come of age in a time of great superhero comics and romcom movies, pop music and primary schools.

"Engaging and thought-provoking... Wee presents a fresh  and ageless view of the bizarre and the mundane."

— Ovidia Yu

AN EPIC OF DURABLE DEPARTURES
by Jason Wee
published by Math Paper Press

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This new poetry collection stands as a record of a friendship between two artists formed in the shadow of illness and mortality. Using the renga and haiku as departure points, Wee wrestles with the limits of art and of the document even as he summons werewolves, ghosts, and other myths. Faced with the inadequacies of witness, An Epic moves towards the living in reverse time, opening with obituaries and ending with a renewed beginning.

SONNETS FROM THE SINGLISH: UPSIZE EDITION (2ND PRINTING)
by Joshua Ip
published by Math Paper Press

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sonnets from the singlish is a collection of 88 poems on love, language and the pursuit of laughter. the poems are loosely translated from the english-based creole language colloquially spoken in singapore, widely known as singlish.

the poems were originally composed in the sonnet form, an archaic italian fourteen-line rhyming verse form that follows the rhythmic rules of iambic pentameter. people still write like this primarily for ease of formatting. they are most tolerable when read out loudly in a singaporean accent.

footnotes on falling
by Joshua Ip
published by Math Paper Press

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footnotes on falling is a collection of 44 poems about sub-optimal life choices. the poems constantly laugh at themselves because they are polite, and asian. they shuffle their feet sideways while declining eye contact. they indulge in wordplay because it gives them something to do with their fingers. they prefer to read out but also prefer this be done in private. they secretly would like you to bring them home.

MOTHER OF ALL QUESTIONS
by Grace Chia
published by Math Paper Press

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Mother of All Questions is Grace Chia's third poetry collection about womanhood exploring what home means, how personal identities intersect and the meaning of life by examining domestic psychodrama, childhood innocence, gendered rebellion and the intimate dynamics of love, desire and loss. In Chia's lyrical and elegiac poetry, she makes putty of the female body's vast and richly textured landscape to mould stories of sentiment and the sensuous into callused and tender truths.

WE R FAMILY
edited by Grace Chia
published by Math Paper Press

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Families come packaged in all shapes and sizes. At the heart of every family unit is love — or what passes off as love. 

A father and son bond over a loss — with wool. A myopic daughter sees her parents clearly for the first time. Two mental patients learn to coexist under the same roof. An American biracial dad finds moorings with his African adoptee. And a Kiwi mum in a mixed family grows roots in multicultural Singapore.

An anthology of eight unforgettable tales, We R Family celebrates the family in its colourful diversity from the whispers of homes in nameless cities to the metropolises of SIngapore, New York, Mumbai and Addis Ababa to the suburbs of Indiana and Connecticut. 

名的起源 (WHAT GIVES US OUR NAMES)
by 冯啟明 Alvin Pang
translated by 黄子明 Wong Chee Meng
published by Math Paper Press

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他的靈感源自一本書，就如你曾幾何時讀過，也特別珍愛的某一本書。但或許對你而言，書的封面是俗氣得叫你完全記不起。他採用的畫布，卻不僅是自己的肌膚，而簡直是自身 的生命。他花了不少日子，來述說別人的故事，彷彿這些故事的發現，也組成了他的自我。為了達到這樣的效果，他學會靜心而深入地觀察，把表面的繁瑣都看透，只留意到本質不變的色彩。一個接一個地，他在深夜裡將它們縫入自己的心坎裡，同時為它們逐個加以命名。他借用你故事裡不同的點滴，也就此觸動了你。只要你有意仔細端詳，故事都自在其中。