My Book of the Year 2021
For SP Blog’s 8th Annual Books Round-up, 25 Singaporean writers, artists, and thinkers, living in Singapore and abroad, give their favorite read of the year. The book does not have to be written by a Singaporean, but if it isn’t, contributors could recommend a second title that is by a Singaporean. This year, they are joined for the first time by the Singapore Unbound and Gaudy Boy team, who also write passionately about the books that they care for. Big thanks to all our contributors. We hope you enjoy reading all the contributions as much as we’ve enjoyed compiling them. Please support independent publishers and booksellers by ordering from them directly. If you believe in intellectual and cultural exchange as we do, please consider making a donation here.
Balli Kaur Jaswal, novelist. A Good Day to Die, by Mahita Vas (Marshall Cavendish, 2021). Mahita Vas's first memoir, Praying to the Goddess of Mercy was an unflinching exploration of living with bipolar disorder. In this follow-up memoir, she brings that honesty into exploring her experiences with suicidal ideation. Stigmas around mental illness in Singapore are slow to break down, and voices like Mahita's are much-needed in these times.
Boedi Widjaja, visual artist. My book for the year of 2021 is Home is Where We Are by Wang Gungwu and Margaret Wang, the second volume of the two-part autobiography of historian Wang Gungwu, whose work on the Chinese in Southeast Asia holds much meaning for me. The biographical account spanned the time from Wang’s return from Nanjing to a post-colonial Malaya, through his student days in the newly formed University of Malaya, to his move to Australia as director of the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University in 1968. What was particularly interesting for me was to read about Wang’s contemplation of his identity as a Malayan in a nation that had yet to be. Searching for a common Malayan language, Wang had considered becoming a writer, and he wrote poems in a “kind of “Malayanized” English or “Engmalchin.” The historian also dipped his toes into politics by getting involved in the Students’ Union and founding a Socialist Club in the university. As the story has it, it was a trip to Delhi to attend an international conference that strengthened Wang’s interest in the historian trade. Having met a history student with a passion for ancient Indian history, Wang was inspired to look into China’s ancient past, setting the path for the scholar and teacher to “observe political and social changes” across time and “meeting people with different origins and backgrounds.”
Cyril Wong, poet and fictionist. A Good Day To Die by Mahita Vas, published by Marshall Cavendish (2021). This book provides much respite in a time when political correctness is favoured over meaningful honesty. Mahita is frank, firm and unpretentious in the way she strives to let us would-be suicides know that we are not alone.
Esther Vincent, poet and editor. My book of the year is Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for our Relationships with Animals (2015) by Lori Gruen, published by Lantern Books. I have always loved animals, but this book provided me with an ethical framework to perceive and articulate ways of relating to and caring for our more-than-human kin, one founded upon recognising our (unequal and oftentimes exploitative) entanglements, which then leads to the need for us to attend responsibly to the wellbeing of the other. I love how Gruen makes the ecofeminist ethic of entangled empathy accessible to her readers: "Entangled empathy is a way for oneself to perceive and to connect with a specific other in their particular circumstance, and to recognise and assess one's place in reference to the other."
Felix Cheong, poet and fiction writer. Danielle Lim’s And Softly Go the Crossings (Penguin, 2020) shows a writer at full throttle and in control of her craft. Her first collection of short stories has all the elements we’ve come to associate with her writing – taut prose, attention to details and an insight into ordinary characters at crossroads. Little wonder it was the winner in two categories – Book of the Year and Best Literary Work – at this year’s Singapore Book Awards.
Jason Soo, filmmaker. I would like to recommend Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020). The book presents a sweeping history of this war, examining the complicity of the Western powers and their Arab partners, as well as the failures of the Palestinian leadership. Khalidi even points out the necessity for Palestinians to acknowledge that, like themselves, Israeli Jews are also a people with a national belonging to the land. Three words kept ringing in my ears as I turned the pages of the book: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS).
Jeremy Tiang, writer and translator. I was blown away by YZ Chin's Edge Case (USA: Ecco, 2021), in which a Malaysian tech worker in New York City deals simultaneously with the sudden disappearance of her husband and the impending expiration of her visa. A tender look at the difficulty of relationships and the loneliness of immigration, this novel is full of dark humour and unexpected revelations. Edwina is a protagonist for our times: flailing and fearing herself beyond redemption, while doing her best to navigate treacherous territory. I also enjoyed Sembawang by Kamaladevi Aravindan, translated from Tamil by her daughter, Anitha Devi Pillai (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish, 2020) -- an exuberant account of the tumultuous lives of Tamil and Malayalee migrant workers in the eponymous neighbourhood during the 1960s and after, full of well-researched historical detail.
Jolene Tan, novelist. I waited for this for years, and it didn’t disappoint. Historian and science fiction writer Ada Palmer capped off the magisterial Terra Ignota books with Perhaps the Stars (UK: Head of Zeus, 2021). This series depict a centuries-old world order that has succeeded that of nation-states: an alliance of ‘Hives’ freed from geographical constraint and formed by voluntary association, individuals choosing their preferred governance and laws. Humanity has overcome the bloody drives that fuelled long-ago armed conflicts (exponential growth, resource expropriation, majority-minority dynamics, organised religion, rigid gender roles)... or has it? Where first book Too Like the Lightning drops the reader in the moment just before crisis, this final entry swells into all-out war and a wild rollercoaster remaking of this strange and familiar world. Intimate, cavernous and audacious, brimming with sweet and savoury brainfood, Terra Ignota works, plays and dreams on so many scales. Closer to the 21st century, I will be thinking for a long time about the piercing poetry and fury of Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War by Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple (UK: Ballantine Books, 2018) and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (UK: Profile Books, 2018).
Joshua Ip, poet. My favorite read of 2021 has to be Daryl Lim's just-released Anything but Human (Singapore: Landmark Books, 2021). Resisting the Singaporean urge to mass-produce, Daryl has waited five years after his first collection, A Book of Changes, to produce a breathtaking sophomore effort that explores all the shades between and beyond black humor and white space. The first read is a pleasant gambol through nimble images that may elicit many a wry chuckle, but repeat readings are an invitation to lose yourself in a dark forest of shattered language. Also deserving of honorable mention are a swath of excellent and late-breaking poetry debuts after a couple of dry years for Singaporean poetry, including Ang Shuang's How to Live with Yourself (Singapore: Math Paper Press, 2021), Laura Jane Lee's flinch & air (UK: Outspoken, 2021), and Ann Ang's Burning Walls for Paper Spirits (Singapore: Pagesetters, 2021).
Yeow Kai Chai, poet. Vijay Seshadri’s That Was Now, This Is Then (Graywolf Press, 2020) is the perfect pandemic read you didn’t know you needed. In a year in which we have been (yet again) waylaid by a pesky virus, Seshadri’s limber, wandering poetry gives voice to the rollercoaster emotions we feel—an inchoate sense of malaise, an insurmountable sense of loss, interstitial moments of acceptance and beauty. At the core is an insatiable itch for truth, however uncomfortable. This time, the itch goes much deeper, as the poet grieves for the passing of his parents, in stunningly open-hearted elegies ‘Your Living Eyes’ and ‘Collins Ferry Landing.’ Heart and mind are in alignment, and everything is eclipsed. In the dark, you can see clearly now. In that respect, I’d also recommend the Singaporean title, Heng Siok Tian’s sixth poetry collection, Grandma’s Attic, Mom’s HDB, My Wallpaper (Landmark Books, 2021). Siok’s familial obsessions and ceaseless search for self-affirmation achieve a newfound resonance, an unsentimental clarity that illumes. She’s a relentless excavator. The past is relived time and again, raw and splintering. “Now, each rainbow/reminds me of the rainbow striped blouse/you burned in,” goes the last line of the first poem, ‘Open Coffin: Rainbow Blouse.’ Indeed, these poems are naked, flawed, too literal, and quite devastating. They are tough on us, but even tougher on herself. There’s scant wordplay nor much resolution. May the words save her soul, and ours.
Gwee Li Sui, poet, artist, and critic. 2021 started and is ending for me with the best recent books I have read in a while. I had Koh Jee Leong’s Connor and Seal (Sibling Rivalry, 2019) and Snow at 5pm (Bench Press/Gaudy Boy, 2020) with me last December and kept returning to them all January. They are incredible works that I need to forget are by the same author. Connor and Seal is a slim poetry book that narrates the his/story of two gay lovers from their birth. It feels like a verse successor to Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2015), where period snapshots work to intertwine choice and fate, vulnerability and strength. Snow at 5pm is an oppositely thick book with over a hundred haikus. Koh invents their origin and writer and then proceeds to create as many long commentaries, also by an invented writer. The haikus are wonderfully delicate while the commentaries perform intelligence with a nudge and a wink. It is October, and I have just put down the first volume of Sean Lam’s delicious Geungsi (2021). This new comic title tells a highly fascinating, ongoing horror story that rather successfully adapts the manga form for Singaporean sensibilities. A Geungsi is an East Asian breed of vampire whom Lam now modernises as a way to construct a web of exploitative relationships. It is also used by him as a vehicle to observe and tease out lay-level social issues. As rich as the writing here is the art style with its rough, broad strokes that are instantly recognisable and charming. The pages ooze confidence and pack the right balance between fun and chills. I find myself wanting to read on and watch this wild world explode – and that is surely a good thing.
Haresh Sharma, playwright. I would like to recommend two books. The first is Call and Response 2: A Singapore Migrant Anthology. Over the years I've come to know many migrant poets and artists living and working in Singapore, as a judge of the Migrant Poetry Competition and mentor to Birds Migrant Theatre. This rich collection of poetry and prose captures the complexities and diversity of the writers' experiences. The concept of pairing 'local' and 'migrant' writers brings added resonance to the writings. The second book is Exhale: An Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices. This is a massive collection, beautifully curated and structured, featuring new voices which are refreshing and self-assured. As Mx Ho Yi Hui writes in Equatorial Fairytales, American Dreams:
Fuck it. Silence is an immigrant's rule but I'm tired.
Tearing apart at the seams for some acceptance
In a colonised, cis gay world who spits in the face of anyone outside
The binary because all we are is a threat to their happy ending.
It's time to tear apart the status quo, and make these anthologies compulsory reading for all.
Marc Nair, poet and photographer. Vessel: A Memoir by Cai Chongda (HarperVia, 2021) is not a boundary-breaking book in terms of form. Cai writes clearly and with a sound grasp of the conventions of memory. His narrative navigates the pull and tug of childhood against the parallel currents of personal endeavour and a nation’s progress. But there is an emotive chord, brought out in a nuanced fashion by Dylan Levi King’s translation, that leaves me with an indelible impression and keeps me wandering the streets of his hometown village long after I have finished the book. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Crispin Rodrigues’ How Now Blown Crow (Math Paper Press, 2021), the third in a trilogy of poetry books, closing the cycle of a particular period of his life, one in which he searches for strands of identity, love and belonging in both interior and exterior landscapes. This last collection is the most developed of the three, having benefited from swathes of research and personal stories that walk a metaphorical line between revelation and dramatic tension.
Meira Chand, novelist. Singapore Literature Prize-winner Danielle Lim’s new book And Softly Go the Crossings, published earlier this year in Singapore by Penguin Books, is a collection of her short stories. These deeply felt tales explore not only the quintessential nature of Singapore life, with its emphasis on academic success, social and material status, and the difficulties of working parents, but the deeper human struggles that go almost unnoticed in daily life. The characters in these stories may live ordinary lives, but life is never ordinary, and Lim delicately reveals the complexity of relationships and social connections. The stories span diverse dilemmas, from a son trying to close the distance between himself and his dying father, to how people subtly change, losing their humanity to save themselves when pitted against one another, especially in Singapore’s competitive work-place culture. The inner journey we make from darkness to light, or our refusal to make that journey, determines the quality of our life. Danielle Lim shows us that human connection is a complex tapestry of love and loss, loneliness, and suffering, hope and healing, darkness, and beauty. The profound nature of her work positions her firmly as one of Singapore’s more important writers.
O Thiam Chin, fictionist. In a year that is almost exactly like the year before, when life stalls and holds its breath, and time stretches endlessly from one day to another, books are my true and abiding solace, a narrow path out of the tedium and ennui that never seems to break. I fill my days with novels and stories, with words—so many words, ceaseless, never-ending—that I hope would offer me some kind of a rupture—rapture?—or a temporary suspension of the persistent low mood that is not exactly despair or desperation, but hovers in between, a low-grade purgatory state of middling melancholy. What exactly am I feeling, or seeking, or wanting to escape from? In Kristen Radtke’s graphic non-fiction book Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness (Pantheon Books, 2021), she probes deep into this silent, wide-ranging epidemic, examining how loneliness affects individuals and society through the rise of technology and social media, plumbing her own experiences as well as delving into scientific studies and works of writers and philosophers to ask: what does it mean to be lonely, to crave solitude and yet long for intimacy, to be alone in a crowd. Through her nuanced, empathic drawings, she creates the imaginative space for me to deepen my own ideas and understanding about solitude and isolation, about people and connection. A perfect companion to this book, to balance the mind and the heart—what one thinks and what one feels—I highly recommend The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse (HarperOne, 2019), by Charlie Mackesy, a soulful book filled with rugged, breathtaking illustrations that speak to the power and beauty of friendship, unity, hope, and kindness.
Thum Ping Tjin, historian. I'm going to pick Jolene Tan's After the Inquiry (Ethos Books, 2021). (I should note I interviewed her on my podcast about the book.) It was terrifying and horrifying in how awfully familiar it was: the sheer banality of authoritarianism. It demonstrates how insidious the ideologies of neoliberalism and meritocracy are, as they provide a normative basis to fully justify discrimination and exploitation of people who are structurally or socially discriminated against. How often do we think that poor people deserve their lot in life, or that everything in life could be made more efficient through applying the free market, or that minorities don't succeed in the system because they don't work as hard, when actually decades of experience now show that none of those things are true? How often do we accept, unthinkingly, the hypocrisies and contradictions of the PAP-created system in Singapore without even stopping to think about them? After decades of systematic brainwashing, we have all internalised these ideologies to some degree, to the point where some deeply abhorrent beliefs have become normalised in Singapore. Likewise, the protagonist applied these ideologies to his own life, and especially to how he treated the people around him, without even blinking. He filled me with horror - but I would not be the least surprised if a senior PAP politician or civil servant read the book and was puzzled why anyone would disagree with the protagonist - and that is the scariest thing of all. What have we become???
Samuel Lee, poet and cultural worker. My favorite book of 2021 is from cloud projects, a new and innovative publisher based in Kuala Lumpur. Its first endeavour, Banned in KL, Astro Boy Rides the Wave to Sky Kingdom on a Grasshopper: Malaysia in Fifteen Postcards by Lim Sheau Yun, Ong Kar Jin and Simon Soon (2021), is a bilingual, object-driven chronicle of Malaysia from the 1880s to the present. A narrative of Malaysia, and indeed of Singapore, unfolds across a series of ration cards, magazine illustrations, and ice-cream wrappers, many of them drawn from the collection of the Malaysia Design Archive. But what I love most about this book is the way it thematizes its own circulation, besides the obvious feature of its tear-out postcard pages. Its publisher has elected to take the unusual route of self-piracy as a parallel means of distribution by uploading a pdf version online, imploring all who stumble upon it to “buy it, use it, break it, fix it, trash it, change it, mail it, upgrade it.” A book from Singapore that holds a special place in my heart is Pooja Nansi's third collection of poetry, We Make Spaces Divine (Math Paper Press, 2021). Reproduced alongside its title poem is a photograph of the artist Priyageetha Dia’s Untitled (Golden Staircase), 2017, a nondescript stairwell completely papered over in dazzling gold foil on the 20th floor of Block 103 Jalan Rajah, a public-housing complex in Singapore. (The installation was later challenged by the town council, which initially called it a case of vandalism before attempting to collaborate.) It is an apposite image for this collection, which bathes in a sacralizing light the living rooms, nightclubs, kitchens, bars, and department stores that offer hospitality and resistance against the monocultural, technocratic, and majoritarian tendencies in a city like this. This collection binds together pain and enchantment in a way that refuses to soften the lump in my throat, and I am left with bittersweet recollections of my own friends—many whose lives and gifts are constantly sidelined in national discourse—on so many long-gone dance floors, caught up in a moment of joy that is at once intensely private and divinely collective.
Sebastian Sim, novelist. The Formidable Miss Cassidy By Meihan Boey (Singapore: Epigram Books, 2021). There is a spot along Waterloo Street in Singapore, where one could choose to sit and be treated to a rather peculiar sight. To the right, a magnificent Chinese temple fronted by an imposing arch on top of which a pair of undulating dragons stand guard. To the left, an august Hindu temple featuring a pantheon of gods and goddesses right atop the entrance. What is truly amazing is that the Hindu temple saw it fit to place a huge urn near its entrance so that the visitors to the Chinese temple could also pay their respect with offerings of joss sticks. This convivial co-existence of diverse cultures and religions is a signature characteristic of Singapore. It is this very same signature trait that makes Meihan Boey’s The Formidable Miss Cassidy stand out from the other local titles published in 2021. Like the title character Miss Cassidy, the reader is introduced to Singapore in the 1890s, a land of varied people and cultures. It follows that even the supernatural beings from diverse backgrounds cross paths here. Amidst the many delightful and thrilling cross-cultural encounters, a blood-thirsty Pontianak cultivates a taste for foreign blood, while an occidental sea monster recruits a Southeast Asian toyol to do her bidding. Meihan Boey stirs into this tantalizing pot of wild adventures the tribulations of human players one readily roots for, be it forbidden love between those separated by social class and race, or the anxiety of a patriarch who suspects his family has been placed under a curse. This page-turner of a tale is easily my favorite read of the year.
Yong Shu Hoong, poet. All the familiar traits I like about Australian poetry are intact here: aboriginal references, the closeness to the land, and a sense of Indonesia’s proximity (and alienness) to Australia. But Rebecca Edwards’ Plague Animals (Puncher & Wattmann, 2020) goes further to depict the poet’s struggles with physical pain and emotional trauma, and her fluid outpouring of love, which can also sound a lot like anguish, especially in poems about the estrangement from flesh and blood. On the Singapore front, the book I’d recommend is Jason Wee’s In Short, Future Now (Rockbund Art Museum & Sternberg Press, 2021), one of the finalists for the Gaudy Boy Poetry Prize 2019. It contains a “single poetic sequence” that offers much to discover within the text, but is itself an exquisite artwork whose physical form is lovely to behold and even more intriguing to unravel and take apart.
Teo Soh Lung, lawyer. Completing The Singapore Story? Memoirs of A. Mahadeva, Journalist Imprisoned Without Trial by Arun Bala (Word Image Pte Ltd, 2021). This book tells the important and sad history of Singapore when bright and idealistic people who would have been great leaders were arrested and imprisoned without trial under the Internal Security Act. Anyone who has any doubt about the innocence of victims of Operation Coldstore (1963) which was launched jointly by three governments—UK, Singapore and Malaya—should read this book. A. Mahadeva, a brilliant journalist, was one of the victims.
Sonny Liew, graphic novelist. Adam Tooze’s Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy (US: Viking, 2021). The Covid-19 pandemic has brought about unprecedented changes, but it can be hard to quantify or even remember what's happened in the nearly two years since. Economic historian Tooze provides the numbers, revisits the events and frames the arguments—aware that "any effort to cast a narrative frame over the tumult we are still living through is bound to be partial and subject to revision", but in the belief that we do so for a "deeper understanding of what is really entailed by the proposition that every true history is contemporary history". Singapore gets the briefest of mentions, but perhaps it's up to us to write our own stories. Tom Gauld’s The Little Wooden Robot and the Log Princess (US: Neal Porter Books, 2021). The always brilliant Tom Gauld's beautifully illustrated take on fairytales, with witches, kings, and a family of beetles. Everyone should read more Tom Gauld.
Tania De Rozario, writer and artist. My book of the year is The Gospel of Breaking by Jillian Christmas (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020), a stunning collection of poetry that re-examines notions of what it means to be holy. Unapologetically queer, the images here are luminous, and the author’s exploration of metaphor and form is as brilliant as her live performances. I also recommend Joel Tan’s chapbook Fat Shame (The Substation, 2017). I know I am getting to it late, but it was worth the wait. With a sharp eye, Tan explores fat stigma and shaming in Singapore across a variety of personal, cultural, and political contexts, weaving them together into a remarkable personal essay.
William Phuan, arts administrator. Singa-Pura-Pura: Malay Speculative Fiction from Singapore, edited by Nazry Bahrawi (Singapore: Ethos Books, 2021). The anthology Singa-Pura-Pura brings to the fore Malay speculative fiction. The collection of short stories, which includes works written in and translated into English, enriches and expands the spec-fi genre with a familiar yet decidedly Malay experience, transporting the readers to a multitude of imagined worlds. Lonely Face, by Yeng Pway Ngon, translated by Natascha Bruce (Singapore: Balestier Press, 2019). One of our literary greats Yeng Pway Ngon sadly passed away at the beginning of this year. A number of his novels have been translated into English, such as Unrest and Costume. Lonely Face, a translation of one of his earlier novels, is a wonderful addition to his canon. Natascha's deft translation expertly captures Yeng's incisive prose and the quiet unraveling of a man as his life falls apart.
Ng Yi-Sheng, poet, playwright, and fictionist. There's a lot of books that've wowed me this year, and it's hard to pick favourites! Pooja Nansi's We Make Spaces Divine (Math Paper Press, 2021) probably tops my local list: I've always loved how her poetry celebrates the joy of the senses and the soul-crushingness of racism, and this third compilation of her work reveals that she's only become more brilliant with age. Internationally, I'm awed by Vietnamese-American SFF author Nghi Vo's The Tiger Who Came Down the Mountain (Tor, 2020), an East Asian-inspired fantasy novella that plays with the legend of the weretiger, but in a splendidly lesbian, and spellbindingly metafictional manner.
From the Singapore Unbound and Gaudy Boy Team:
Ally Chua, Public and Media Specialist. My favourite book of the year would be Iron Widow (Penguin Teen, 2021) by Xiran Jay Zhao, set in an alt-universe China where giant robots, piloted by male soldiers and their concubines, battle colossal mechas. In the process, the concubines often lose their lives. I thoroughly enjoyed this take-no-prisoners YA debut. Iron Widow features a particularly unconventional heroine unbound by the ideals of morality. She is furious, ferocious, and uses her villainous tendencies to get what she wants. She systematically dismantles the Chinese patriarchal society in the novel that is set up for young females to fail - and die. Oh - this novel also features a healthy depiction of a polyamorous relationship. All these are interspersed with terse, adrenaline-fueled fight scenes featuring giant robots. I can't recall a debut quite like this in a while. For books published in Singapore, I really enjoyed We Make Spaces Divine (Math Paper Press, 2021) by Pooja Nansi. It is a rumination on the places that she calls home and the spaces that feel like home - a recollection of hiphop nights in clubs, drunk nights, and midnight cab rides. The images she paints and the visceral elegance with which she writes of these moments feel particularly nostalgic, especially for a Singaporean who has been through these experiences before. In a way, it is a love letter to the liminal wisps of Singapore at night, seen through the eyes of the young and drunk and carefree. The book also delves into Pooja's fatigue from microaggressions and the weightlessness of belonging in two different places, capturing the ennui, the exasperation that such experiences demand. I've watched Pooja perform many of these poems in her play You are Here, but reading the poetry in print brings another layer of meaning.
Janelle Tan, Assistant Interviews Editor. Over the last year, I've found Traci Brimhall's Come the Slumberless into the Land of Nod (USA: Copper Canyon Press, 2020) to be immensely generative for my writing practice. It's a beautiful book driven by rhetoric, longing, and grief. It speaks so directly to my writing that I find the cogs in my brain whirring every time I pick it up. For that reason, it's been the book I've returned to throughout this year. As Assistant Interviews Editor, I've had the pleasure of interviewing a lot of brilliant writers, and my Singaporean book of the year is Mok Zining's The Orchid Folios (Singapore: Ethos Books, 2020). As younger Singaporeans are engaging with our colonial past, I think it speaks very eloquently to colonization and what it means to be rooted. Formally, it's also a fascinating book and I don't think I've read anything like it in a local context. I think Mok knows how to construct the kind of tight, compressed poetic line I'm always searching for.
Jee Leong Koh, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher. I'm a fan of Irish poet Martina Evans, and her latest collection American Mules (UK: Carcanet, 2021) gives many different pleasures. The shorter lyrics offer a wealth of local and personal details that seduce a reader with the childhood world of Cork and the adult one of London. Even when she is writing about her job in radiography, she is not so much writing about the work as about the people: their fears, their waywardness, their idiosyncracies. The poetic sequences, whether they are about shoes or cats, provide the delights of variations on a theme. The long narrative "Mountainy Men" is yet another triumph of her storytelling skill. Singaporean poet Yeow Kai Chai returns after 15 years with his third book One to the Dark Tower Comes (Singapore: firstfruits publications, 2020), and I reckon it is a masterpiece. Death is confronted with a spread of ideas, an exhibit of observations, a gauntlet of music. We see in the poetry the Ashberyian interest in cliches, the Rabelaisian delight in wordplay, the fracture of standardized language, and the cosplay of fantastical personages, such as the Absent Conductor, the Handyman, and the One True Valentine. Reading Kai Chai is extremely liberating.
Kendrick Loo, Reviews Editor. What is the value of memory and history? The Irish poet Eavan Boland, who passed away just last year, examined this same question in her final collection The Historians (UK: Carcanet, 2020). Boland was a foremost voice of Irish writing, and she was always interested by the role of women in preserving memory: "Record keepers with a different task./ To stop memory from becoming history./ To stop words healing what should not be healed." Closer to home, Jini Kim Watson has published a research monograph which rescues local literature from the neat category of postcolonial texts. Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization (US: Fordham University Press, 2021) pries open the world of Asian literature to examine how authors have reflected the complex realities of the ideological Cold War. It points the way forward for new avenues of inquiry, reminding us of history's constructed narratives and the values it subtly embeds.
Laetitia Keok, Editorial Intern (Gaudy Boy). Natalie Wee's remarkable chapbook Our Bodies and Other Fine Machines (San Press, 2021) has taught me a lot about living in a time of deep grief. If I could highlight every line in this book, I would. It's shown me what joy can look like even in times of crisis, and at every turn, Wee's speaker dares me to imagine multiple versions of survival, each one more radiant than the next. Heartfully printed from a small press, this beautiful collection feels a lot like cradling tenderness in my hands—which is perhaps something we all need these days.
Maggie Wang, Editorial Intern (Book Reviews). This year, I especially enjoyed Cynthia Miller's debut poetry collection, Honorifics, published by Nine Arches Press. The collection is a conceptually and emotionally courageous exploration of Miller's Malaysian Chinese identity and heritage, and her innovative forms and lyrical grace make the collection well worth reading. I also enjoyed Elaine Chiew's story collection The Heartsick Diaspora, which addresses similar themes and which I reviewed for SP Blog in June.
Sharmini Aphrodite, Fiction Editor. Kevin Barry's That Old Country Music (Canongate Books, 2021) blends wry humour with lyric heartbreak. The prose is clean, textured with a rhythm drawn from the landscape; the inner lives of the characters rich enough that they are able to shine through the simplest gestures.
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