新加坡外文

“The land is furrowed deep with worry. The angsana trees are turning orange with pain.” This collection emerges, squeaking and poorly oiled, from this rubbish heap we’ve all piled up. It revels in the transfixing beauty of this last age of man. These poems have dwelt too close to the nuclear waste facility. These poems have traversed through fields of madness for grains for truth. These poems attempt to wring the last dregs out of language. Anything but Human grasps for a poetry beyond our collective exhaustion.

About the Author

Daryl Lim Wei Jie is a poet, writer and literary critic from Singapore. His first book of poetry is A Book of Changes (2016). He is the co-editor of Food Republic: A Singapore Literary Banquet (2020), the first definitive anthology of literary food writing from Singapore. He was quoted in international media for his tabulation of similar texts in the plagiarism of the cookbook by Sharon Wee by Elizabeth Haigh. His poems won him the Golden Point Award in English Poetry in 2015, awarded by the National Arts Council, Singapore.

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.

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.’

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

UNMARKED TREASURE
by Cyril Wong
published by Math Paper Press

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A ghost steps out of its body after a suicide and looks back at it in wonder. The poet wonders at his own existence and struggles between actual living and a desire to depart. Recipient of the Singapore Literature Prize, this collection is Cyril Wong’s most personal sequence of poems, held together by memories about family life and intimate relationships, these moments charged with the pain of love, dreams and death and an unflinching exploration of the self.

Food Republic is a generous serving of Singapore's food culture: from the making and eating of food, to the sale and hawking of it, our love and hate of it, and the effects of its consumption and deprivation.

Food has always been our safe space, our comfort zone: a place where we could freely engage in heated arguments about the best nasi lemak, the most fragrant cendol and whether the standard of the stall has dropped or not. Yet this anthology, featuring more than one hundred literary explorations of our food and food culture, also shows that when people write about food, they often aren't just talking about food but usually about something else, closer to the heart. Or the bone.

Curated from previously published work and selections from an open call, the poems, fiction and non-fiction in Food Republic range from the passionately realised to tantalisingly surreal. Think of it as a buffet, a banquet, an omakase, a smorgasbord, a nasi padang spread, a thali or a rijssttafel – we hope we've assembled one to your taste. Come. Eat.

Some Contributors: Arthur Yap, Leong Liew Geok, Edwin Thumboo, Toh Hsien Min, Wong Phui Nam, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Koh Jee Leong, Lee Tzu Pheng, Joshua Ip, Margaret Leong, Alvin Pang, Catherine Lim, Ng Yi-Sheng, Amanda Lee Koe, Alfian Sa'at, Wong May, Gopal Baratham, Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, Yong Shu Hoong, Aaron Maniam, Hamid Roslan, Daren Shiau, Boey Kim Cheng, Theophilus Kwek, Cyril Wong and Jennifer Anne Champion

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

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.

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.