In her review of Vital Signs by Amlanjyoti Goswami (India: Poetrywala, 2022), Samantha Neugebauer takes the measure of the poet’s history of larking.
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The successor to SP Blog, SUSPECT is pleased to present yet another round-up of the year’s favorite reads, recommended by Singaporean writers, artists, and thinkers.
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Elise J. Choi reviews Babel, or The Necessity of Violence by R. F. Kuang (USA: Harper Voyager, 2022).
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One of three winners of the 2022 Singapore Unbound Awards for the Best Undergraduate Critical Essays on Singapore and Other Literatures, Katherine Enright’s essay analyzes Ng Yi-Sheng’s short story “Agnes Joaquim, Bioterrorist” as a subversion of the conventions of Victorian plant fiction and of the orchid as a Singaporean national symbol.
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Looking for holiday gifts? What about traditional folktales from India, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, and Singapore? Ng Yi-Sheng has some ideas for you.
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One of three winners of the 2022 Singapore Unbound Awards for the Best Undergraduate Critical Essays on Singapore and Other Literatures, Quek Yee Kiat’s paper is a study of selected rewritings of myths in Singapore and their re-significations, encompassing two interconnecting themes––“Fearless Females” and “Queering Hybrids.”
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One of three winners of the 2022 Singapore Unbound Awards for the Best Undergraduate Critical Essays on Singapore and Other Literatures, Timothy Wan’s essay uses Pearl Bank as a focal point to offer a reconsideration of how Singaporeans engage with nostalgia.
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In his interview with Janelle Tan, poet Jonathan Chan speaks of the “five foundings” that have shaped his family’s history and his personal poetics.
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In this essay on the late Malaysian poet Wong Phui Nam, Daryl Lim Wei Jie considers how death acted for the poet as “a catalyst of deeper truths about the exilic migrant condition that he perceived himself to be stranded in – and the broader human condition.”
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Jiaqi Kang reviews Pearls from Their Mouth by Pear Nuallak (UK: Hajar Press, 2022).
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For Halloween, Ng Yi-Sheng investigates speculative literary takes on the paranormal from four continents.
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“You smell like the sun, we say to a person/ carrying the loosened backpack of a long day.” —from “BRUSHING MY TEETH AT THE EDGE OF ELIZABETH PLACE”
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Lydia Wei reviews Anything but Human by Daryl Lim Wei Jie (Singapore: Landmark Books, 2021).
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Three poems by Sal that play with tropes in NSFW K-pop fanfiction and borrow language from real YouTube comments left on 'focus cams' or jigcams.
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Was she just a subservient woman although she tried so hard to be self-aware and smart? The unnamed protagonist in Suhasini Patni’s new story “is it a curse or is it the day” wondered.
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Ground-breaking in their time, but are these Southeast Asian books good reads? This month, Ng Yi-Sheng gives the low-down, and one thumbs-up.
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“I wanted to live to tree time.” Shalini Sengupta reviews How I Became a Tree (India: Aleph Books, 2017) and VIP: Very Important Plant (London: Shearsman, 2022) by Sumana Roy.
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In “Dear Pluto,” Susan L. Lin writes to the Death Planet about her plans to visit it in the distant future.
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In these attentive poems, Jackson Minjoon Wright shines a light on, as he puts it, “the particularities of adoption and secluded life in the Midwest.”
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In these exacting poems, Joey S. Kim considers the impact of empire on identity and writing.
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