New Singapore Poetries
NEW SINGAPORE POETRIES
edited by Marylyn Tan and Jee Leong Koh
978-0-9994514-9-6
$22.00 / Paperback / 6" x 9" / 320 pages
Gaudy Boy, December 1, 2022
N. America: Bookshop / Amazon
Singapore: Word Image
Distributed by Ingram
A bold showing of voice, uniqueness, nerve, and precision from a new generation of Singapore poets.
About
Wrapping itself, tasting, luxuriating in the recurrent themes of the body, family, sexuality, spirituality, neo-colonialism, geographies, positionalities, identity, and nationalism, New Singapore Poetries brims with the ambition and talent of 18 of Singapore’s newest poetic voices, many hitherto unpublished.
Showcasing an expansive body of work by each poet, New Singapore Poetries is a breathtaking testament to the imagination and nerve of what poetry in Singapore can be—an interrogation of the very nature of what constitutes a poem; a straddling of national identity and personal grief; a processing and yet remembrance of erased history and rewritten trajectories—a way to tell the truth anew.
Mired against the backdrop of Singapore the country, Singapore the city-state republic, and ‘Singapore’ the concept, bearing witness to the past and crystallizing the present, New Singapore Poetries architects futures yet unseen, but yearned for.
Editors:
Marylyn Tan is a sensuous and queer writer-artist-reprobate. Her work aims to subvert, revert and pervert, to disrespect respectability, to take pleasure seriously, and to reclaim power. Her first child, GAZE BACK (Ethos Books, 2018; Singapore Literature Prize, 2020), is the lesbo trans-genre grimoire you never knew you needed.
Jee Leong Koh is the author of Steep Tea (Carcanet), named a Best Book of the Year by UK's Financial Times and a Finalist by Lambda Literary in the US. His collection of zuihitsu The Pillow Book was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. His second Carcanet book Inspector Inspector was published in August 2022. Originally from Singapore, he lives in New York City.
Contributors:
Ally Chua is a Singaporean poet. She was the 2019 Singapore Unbound Fellow for New York City and a member of local writing collective /s@ber. Ally has been published in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Cordite Poetry Review, and Lammergeier Magazine.
Andrew Kirkrose Devadason (he/him/his; b. 1997) is a queer transgender Singaporean. Under his birth name, Devadason contributed the winning piece of the 2019 Hawker Prize to the journal OF ZOOS. His work has appeared in journals including Cordite Poetry Review and PERVERSE, and in anthologies including EXHALE: An Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices.
Anurak Saelaow is a Singaporean poet. His work has been published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Cultural Weekly, The Kindling, Ceriph, and elsewhere. He is the author of one chapbook, Schema (The Operating System, 2015), and holds a BA in creative writing and English from Columbia University.
Christian Yeo’s work has been published in The Mays, Anthropocene, and the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, among others. He won the Arthur Sale Poetry Prize, was runner-up for the Aryamati Poetry Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, the Sykes Prize, and the CUPPS Poetry and Prose Prize. His work has been performed at the Lancaster and Singapore Poetry Festivals.
Hamid Roslan is the author of parsetreeforestfire (Ethos Books, 2019). His other work can be found in the Asian American Writers Workshop, Asymptote, minarets, the Practice Research & Tangential Activities (PR&TA) Journal, The Volta, Of Zoos, and the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, among others.
ila’s (@ilailailailaila_) research centers on peripheral narratives surrounding identity, space and histories that lie hidden, particularly kinship with the land and sea. She writes short speculative prose on @myheartisanelephant, an ongoing project about the city titled “pura-pura parade.” She does art sometimes.
Izyanti Asa’ari has been published in anthologies, Ceriph #3, This is Not a Safety Barrier (Ethos Books, 2016), and to let the light in (SingLit Station, 2021) and is a recipient of the Manuscript Assessment Scheme by National Arts Council Singapore. Her work picks at the stories a city inherits, what makes the machine tick.
Jack Xi (they/he) is a queer, disabled Singaporean poet. A member of the writing collective /Stop@BadEndRhymes (stylised /s@ber), they’ve appeared in several online poetry journals and Singaporean anthologies and can be found at jackxisg.wordpress.com.
Kenneth Constance Loe (he/they) is an artist, writer, and performer from Singapore, currently based in Vienna, Austria. His practice revolves around material and sensorial fetishes of desire, queer ecologies, and other tangential thoughts through a performative collocation of sculpture, video, text, movement, and olfactory objects.
Laetitia Keok is a writer and editor from Singapore. She is interested in (re)encountering writing as a site of/for collective care and embodied grief. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published in Hobart Pulp, Wildness Journal, Diode Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Find her at laetitia-k.com
Lisabelle Tay is the author of Pilgrim (The Emma Press, 2021), which is her debut pamphlet. Her work appears in Bad Lilies, Crab Creek Review, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. She lives in Singapore.
Lune Loh is a core member of /S@BER, a Singaporean writing collective. She graduated from the National University of Singapore in 2022. Her works have appeared in journals and magazines such as Pank Magazine, the Evergreen Review, SOFTBLOW, Cha, Cordite, and various SingPoWriMo issues from 2017–2021. Find her waxing at lune.city.
Mok Zining is obsessed with random things: words, arabesques, sand. The Orchid Folios is her first book. Zining lives in Singapore, where she spends most of her free time working on The Earthmovers, an essay collection about sand.
Nathaniel Chew (he/him) is a writer, erstwhile linguist, and library human living in Singapore. His collection featherweight won the 2019 Golden Point Award for Poetry in English. His writing and writing adjacencies have been published in anthologies by Math Paper Press, Longbarrow Press, Poetry School, and in QLRS, SingPoWriMo, Pareidolia Literary, et al.
Shawn Hoo is the author of Of the Florids (Diode Editions, 2022). He is Translation Tuesdays Editor at Asymptote. Shawn’s poems can be found in New Delta Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Queer Southeast Asia, Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, and his translations in the Journal of Practice, Research and Tangential Activities (PR&TA) and Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation.
Shou Jie Eng is a designer, researcher, and writer, whose work examines the relationships between spaces, bodies, and the material histories and cultures of craft. He runs Left Field Projects, a studio practice located in Hartford, CT. His writing has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Softblow, Speculative Nonfiction, and CARTHA. He teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI.
worms virk (they/she/he) is a thing-maker, body-shaker, rule-breaker, working primarily through the mediums of art, performance, poetry, prose, and events direction.
Praise
“An overwhelming collection, each voice is singular, every page yields surprises. One is no longer certain where the boundaries are in the bounty of talents. True to the spirit of Gaudy Boy, an exciting poetry enterprise that enlarges one’s vision of Singapore.”
—Wong May, author of In the Same Light: 200 Tang Poems for our Century
“Ally Chua’s “The boys in the line-up” stands out as a kind of poem-blurb for New Singapore Poetries, an editorially policed line-up of suspects all guilty, in one way and another, of indecency, disrespect, transgression—and crucial originality. The politics—post-colonial, ecological, sexual—are vividly embodied in psalms, visual poems, elegies, sequences, satires. Jack Xi’s sequence on the McDonald burger is just one riveting exercise in making the world real in verse. Lines from other poems stay in memory, “the only thing complicated is vegetables” (Kenneth Constance Loe) and “I hear her say/come, let us be fish” (Laetitia Keok); in Singapore are figured the cities, past and present, of the world. Marylyn Tan quarries her poems out of ancient material (Christ’s prepuce) and modern (the language of sex sites) to great effect. The book is full of surprise, offence, humour and, above all, unexpected pleasure. The English language is re-energised by its unblushing encounters with a specific set of contemporary worlds.”
—Michael Schmidt, editor of Carcanet’s New Poetries and of PN Review
“The word ‘renaissance’ has been used to describe the unprecedented emergence of poets in 1990s Singapore. There is ample evidence in this compelling gathering of young poets to suggest that another renaissance is happening, one that is more varied, diverse in gender, race and culture, more bold and adventurous in poetics and politics. Reading these poems one is struck by the astonishing array of distinct, arresting voices and styles, the poets’ attentiveness to words and the in-between spaces, their readiness to push the boundaries of form and technique, and the quest to be free of the shackles of identity politics, to explore and extend the possibilities of what it means to be Singaporean and a poet in these challenging, fast-changing times.”
—Boey Kim Cheng, author of The Singer and Other Poems
“Hoa Nguyen's “Poem” talks about poems as “potential to create without/possession” and that poems also unbind reference. New Singapore Poetries challenges us to question and unsettle known tropes, to leave one shore of definitions in search of other possible meanings. The poets featured in this anthology are varied in their styles, subject matter and poetics; some include the use of other languages to unbind us from habitual reliance on a colonial legacy and to centre instead their vital cultural experiences. Others dismantle the normative through queer subversions and investigations. We the readers are treated to a sumptuous palette of fresh linguistic exploration.”
—Lydia Kwa, author of Pulse and sinuous
“Loud, proud and unbowed—there’s a lot to plumb in New Singapore Poetries, a cornucopia of young and emerging poetic voices spiked with vigour, rudeness, melodrama and devil-may-care sass. To steal a line from Hamid Roslan, these poems defy the essentialist death-trap: “Where I am taught how I ought to see myself.” Instead, these truth-seekers strive for a spirited un-learning, a delicious abandonment of old, didactic ways. Making something (themselves) new, they demand to be judged on their own terms, warts and all. Whether conjuring highly personalised, inter-lingual hinterlands, or zooming in on cycles of animalia and machinery, they navigate intersections of identity and gender and community with strange interest.”
—Yeow Kai Chai, author of One to the Dark Tower Comes
“Vital, form-busting gorgeousity made flesh… New Singapore Poetries breaks—and makes—new ground with the ardency and agency of these fresh voices.”
—Amanda Lee Koe, author of Ministry of Moral Panic
“Jammed into this anthology are the fiercest and the gentlest emotions from a new age of Singaporean poets. Their range attests to a startling flamboyance racing from madcap sweeps of history to urgent violations of thoughts on form, feeling, and the sublime. Here is poetry post-tradition enough to know that there is still a lot of fun to be had!”
—Gwee Li Sui, poet, graphic artist, literary critic
“In this anthology, blood ripens into honey, prayer takes the shape of a lurching metronome and poems leave footprints in flour. A striking and original collection.”
—Tania de Rozario, author of And the Walls Come Crumbling Down
“Skeptical of sentiment and yet full of feeling, these poems are built not out of tired angsana trees and the weary merlions but of this new conglomeration of form and discontent, desire and humour and dare I say joy, or a version of it, that makes me want to say more, more!”
—Lawrence Lacambra Ypil, author of The Experiment of the Tropics
“Undeniably one of the world’s great metropolises, Singapore’s Anglophone poetry hasn't received nearly as much attention as it so evidently deserves, and this first-rate anthology effectively helps to remedy that state of affairs, introducing us to work that is passionate, sardonic, cosmopolitan and conversant in the city-state's multiple and layered identities, adroitly spilling out of the island's physical confines to set its ambitious sights on the whole world.”
—André Naffis-Sahely, editor of Poetry London
"Fabulously transgressive and untranslatable. It demands the reader's surrender to pleasure as the first principle. . . . Undeniably a brave new landmark in Singapore poetry anthologies."
—Christine Chia, QLRS