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About Aerial Roots

Aerial Roots is a poetry collection that meditates on the liminal space of displacement and settlement, arrivals and departures, uprootedness, and assimilation. It is between these hybrid shifts of time and place, of bilocation, that diasporic writers dwell for most of their lives. 

Visualising the ongoing narratives as akin to the banyan tree and its allegorical roots, the poems revisit the vast canvas of memory, places, and lived experiences. This collection negotiates and interrogates the complex issues of identity, ethnicity, belonging, heritage, and multiple homes to know where and what home is. 

About Shilpa Dikshit Thapliyal

Shilpa Dikshit Thapliyal is an Indian-Singaporean poet and author of two poetry collections. Her work has appeared in the Practice Research & Tangential Activities (PR&TA) Journal, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, The Best Asian Poetry, The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, Trivium, Little Things, to let the light in, Anima Methodi, and elsewhere. 

Poems from her previous collection Between Sips of Masala Chai (Kitaab International, 2019) have been selected for secondary school curriculum in Singapore. Her poem, ‘Hymn of Hope’, written during the pandemic for the Homeward project, was performed by the Carnegie Mellon Philharmonic Orchestra. Some of her poems have been translated into Japanese, Spanish, and Chinese Ink-Art. 

Her poems have been nominated for the Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize and awarded second place in The Letter Review Prize, 2022. Her third collection, Aerial Roots, was awarded The Letter Review Prize for Unpublished Books, 2024. She has read poetry at the Singapore Writers Festival, the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, Mumbai, Poetry on the Move, Canberra, The RevTen Radio, USA, and the Festival of Friendship (Revolution of Tenderness, USA).

Shilpa has adjudicated several poetry competitions including the National Poetry Competition, the CLASS Poetry Competition, the National Poetry Recitation Competition, and the Write and Burn Spoken Word Competition. Shilpa serves on the organising committee of Poetry Festival Singapore as a poet and literary organiser.

Born and raised in India, Shilpa completed her Master's in Computer Management (MCM) from Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, Symbiosis University, Pune. She worked in a leading IT services company before relocating to Singapore in 2001. She has recently completed her second Master's, M.A. (Arts) from the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Shilpa resides in Singapore with her family.
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Recommendations/Blurbs

These poems take us to the minutiae of the author’s beloved landscapes, familiar haunts and remembered neighbourhoods, but a new, rich tapestry of sights and sounds; of ethnic variety and riches. This is food for the soul; part of a significant journey of discovery, recall and recovery, a traveller’s recognition of how nature’s beneficence is a palpable blessing no matter where one is in the world.

 — Anne Lee Tzu Pheng

Tender. Present. Generous. Dignified. Shilpa Dikshit Thapliyal’s Aerial Roots is a deeply contemplative collection, intelligent and lustrous in its surfacing of rich feeling and authenticity. Perambulating around the banyan tree are poems laced in heavy symbolism. Threaded through are astonishingly beautiful images and sounds. The confessional moments meander their way confidently through verse, from the ghazal and haibun to prose poem. One becomes witness to a fondness—of memory, of nostalgia. Wait for the beautiful epiphanies, even as time and space remain suspended in this alluring lyric imagination. One encounters a poetry that bravely looks at ideas of identity, border crossings, diaspora, heritage, tradition, community, family, and what it means to belong. Indeed, this is a welcome homecoming for the author, and what a grand tour of a life’s journeying it has been. Sublime. Remarkable. Simply magnificent.

— Desmond Francis Xavier Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé
Winner of the Singapore Literature Prize

Shilpa's poetry traces how shifting light, from "coppered dawn" to "a sundown mist [descending] on the ghats," illuminates the tender narrative of a family in transition. The play between natural radiance and urban gleam becomes an objective correlative for the immigrant clan's own metamorphosis. Each poem distills the complex emotions of leaving and arriving, of roots seeking new soil while branches reach toward changed skies.

—Eric Tinsay Valles, poet, editor and educator

Shilpa's is a voice that is at once intelligent and humane. Her work is dynamic and beautifully paced—a culturally rich and sensually stimulating experience that is, quite simply, a joy to read.

— Kita Das, Ol James
The Letter Review

Shilpa has beautifully meshed the world she grew up in and with the world she currently calls home. She draws parallels between her childhood by recalling memories of Little India and her Amma, and finds joy in how technology keeps the family together internationally. This collection of poems invites the reader into her world of duality, through her thoughtfully crafted words.

— Latha
Writer

Through richly evocative language and a keen eye for botanical metaphors, Shilpa embarks on a poignant exploration of movement and displacement, love and belonging, and the liminal spaces between migration and settlement. Buttressed by her transnational sensibilities, the personal and the universal entwine in her poetry, serving as a living, breathing testament to the intricate connections between place, identity, and the human experience. Like seeds that grow into mighty banyan trees, Shilpa's poems weave a tapestry of interwoven perspectives, akin to a reticulated network of aerial roots—one which branches out into a forest of reflection and imagination that takes root in the reader's mind.

— Ow Yeong Wai Kit
Educator and Poet  

These poems are lush with images and symbols from the two countries/cultures Shilpa deftly inhabits, her original home in India and the new in Singapore where she now lives. The diction reflects this reality,  the English enriched with untranslatable words from the mother country and allusions ( people, places, birds, trees etc), pointing to a restless, assimilative mind journeying to seek identities, roots, and loops in her rich past and present.
 
A cornucopia of poetry.

— Robert Yeo
 Poet and Playwright

Aerial Roots is a heartfelt homage to memories of the poet’s time spent in India, her country of origin. Set under the metaphoric, awning leitmotif of the banyan tree, Thapliyal’s poems offer the reader a universe with hidden windows that open unto an “undergrowth of decades”. One unlocks new meanings every time one enters her work. The poems speak of dislocation, migration, identity or the loss of it, and of the untethered state of our being, while also being contained within exquisite, precise language. The poet has a remarkable ability to draw connections between the personal and the cosmic, the present and the past, longing and reality. Her work is tender, incisive, clear-sighted and deeply intimate, replete with “stains and spills of plump memories”. Her poetry stuns us, wounds us, keeps us warm, while being unapologetically her own. The poems display amazing manoeuvring of the terrain of the page and the mind - a gentle flow, akin to a river’s graceful swirl on its journey. The memories shared with us are mesmerising and quintessentially, culturally, charmingly Indian. Indeed her poems hold “… lamps to moonless skies”. The collection is a milestone written on the existential nuances of life. Every line, an “aperture for departure”.

— Vinita Agrawal
Poet and Editor
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About Rosetta Cultures

Rosetta Cultures is an imprint by TrendLit Publishing that focuses on championing and bridging languages and the arts across cultures and communities.

Rosetta Cultures is currently based in Singapore, serving local and international readers.

Publication Information

ISBN: 978-981-94-3584-5 (Paperback)
CIP: Available with National Libarary Board, Singapore
Publisher / Imprint: Rosetta Cultures
Date of Publication: August 2025
Suggested Categorization: Poetry, Contemporary Literature, Singapore Literature
Format: 19cm (H) x 13cm (W), 100 pages

“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.