Eke: Poems
“Shimmer[s] at the edges of language, where sense becomes sensuous and shifts us away from our habits of silence and speech.” —Divya Victor, author of Kith and Curb
“Exquisite, tantalising construction.” —Shubigi Rao, author, Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book, and winner, Singapore Literature Prize 2024
A visual enactment of attempts at articulating, Eke is the at-tempt-ation towards meaning.
Author
Wahidah Tambee graduated with degrees in psychology and creative writing from Nanyang Technological University.
About
What does the feeling of holding your words and thoughts back—stuck and struck in a state of percolation, a plasma state of signification—feel like? What does it look like for ambivalence and divergence to converge during the moment of articulation, when all word-opportunities collide at once, like wildly unspooling threads, like heavy raindrops on a glass surface racing from one fork to the next?
A collection of visual aberrations that fumble and stammer, and that concede that a closure in expression can never be achieved, the poems of Eke ache towards both painful and opportune expression.
Praise
“To eke is to create something from nothing. And Wahidah Tambee has indeed made something immense from what seems small, humble, compact. An inventive and often whimsical dive into traditions of visual and concrete poetry, this book urges acrobatic reading and adventurous swivels of sonic attention. Wahidah’s kaleidoscopic poems shimmer at the edges of language, where sense becomes sensuous and shifts us away from our habits of silence and speech. Reading Eke during severe times, where my attention has been bludgeoned by the blunt tools of news media and punditry, I leaned against the book’s capacity for bringing us closer to the clarifying, divine purposes of attentive, immersive play.”
—Divya Victor, author of Kith and Curb
“To experience Nurul Wahidah’s Eke is to wade into a sea where you don’t know where the bottom is. It’s mysterious, a little scary, yet very fun and welcoming. It’s an expanse where words and letters are split, stretched and sutured—not to the point of nihilism but rather to realise the potential of these units as organisms in their own right—unruly, protean, and odd. They proliferate, giving birth to new shapes and new touches. How do you navigate this, or even articulate this alien ecosystem? Visually and aurally, you feel the electricity in the gaps, the fumbling and stammering which Wahidah alludes to. Whether you swim to shore, well, that’s another matter altogether.”
—Yeow Kai Chai, author, One to the Dark Tower Comes, and winner, Singapore Literature Prize
“Through jagged refrains, crowded pauses and visual collisions, Wahidah’s words tumble pell-mell through an indexical of her own making. Here, type becomes object, object becomes breathless, and elliptical meanings quiver in the aural periphery of it all. In overlapping words and slip-spelled shapes become visible the delicious entanglements of sculpting, movement, and a sureness of poetic form. Eke is an exquisite, tantalising construction.”
—Shubigi Rao, author, Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book, and winner, Singapore Literature Prize 2024
“Wahidah’s poems remind us that reading hinges on proximity and distance, between legible words and lines, and also between illegibilities. Wahidah’s creations are singularly untouchable in their assembly; they ask to beheld, and in beholding, we find in these pages both the wreckages of our divided language and a wondrous art.”
—Jason Wee, author, From A (Undesirable) Diary
“Reading Eke feels like taking a magnifying glass to the given and finding that it is full of energised gaps and diversions, tensions and collisions. Wahidah’s visual poems teem with life. Words meld and split apart, lines shudder and derail. We’re invited into the full pleasure of the instability of language. If the poems look like clouds, it’s less in their shape and more in the way they move before our eyes, dispersing, reforming, pulling us ever on towards new and unexpected evocations.”
—Jennifer Crawford, author, Koel and Lichen Loves Stone