Good news for ebook users: Bitter Punch is now available in digital form! Swing by the Ethos Books online store to pick up your copy today. Check it out here.
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In the minutes tumbling down to showtime or a fight, the reader and the fighter are at once vulnerable and strong. The likelihood of a letdown, a knockout, trembles in the wings—doubt flickers like a naked bulb swinging from the ceiling, slinging shadows on the walls. Yet these thoughts are garbed in iron-clad resolve; even if the performance misses the mark, the reading, the fight must go on. The reader becomes the reading, the fighter the fight. Having reached the impossibility of retreat, the body obeys the chest and moves one leg forward like a pawn. A bell dings in the head; the first word of my poem jabs the silent air.
Over the weekend, Ethos Books launched They Told Us to Move, an ambitious volume that seeks to examine—and get people talking about—the human, social and political dimensions of a housing relocation project in Dakota Crescent. To quote the synopsis: Dakota Crescent was one of Singapore’s oldest public housing estates and a rental flat neighbourhood for low-income households. In 2016, its residents—many of whom are elderly—were relocated to Cassia Crescent to make way for redevelopment. At first glance, the book’s structure boggles the mind: there are interview transcripts, volunteer reflections and academic essays seemingly talking at cross purposes. One gets the sense, too, that the editor Ng Kok Hoe bears a curious predilection for the number three. It only becomes apparent a couple of pages in that underlying the morass is an intricate layering of voices and views (not unlike a kueh lapis) that seeks to understand the complicated commingling of despair and displacement felt by the residents.
A poem written by a certain Loh Guan Liang appends the conclusion like the tail of a complicated thought. What is a poem doing in a publication that professes to be more academic in nature than it is artistic? Remarkably, it was by chance that my poem found its way into They Told Us to Move. About a month ago, The Straits Times ran a writing contest where participants could stand to see their 200-word love stories published in the Valentine's Day leadup in the paper. I thought I had something that fitted the bill, so I took a stab at it. My piece got chosen among 15 others and so, here we are. The story behind the story, however, begs telling, perhaps even more than the tale itself. I was having dinner at Soup Spoon in Tanjong Pagar on a Friday night some years ago when I spotted a woman eating by herself, like me. I don't think she noticed, but I was watching the way she was glued to her phone as she ate. There was nothing romantic about that scene, more a detached bemusement at the relationship this stranger had with her screen. I jotted down some notes, which then became "Automat".
Last year, around the time Bitter Punch got shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize in Poetry, two Singapore Polytechnic students set up a meeting with me to find out more about my thoughts on technology and its impact on creative writing as part of their assignment. They couldn't quite tell me where the interview was going to be published (if at all), but I obliged nonetheless. Following our chat, I didn't hear from the two girls again. The Singapore Literature Prize 2018 came and went, and I was back to being busy with work and life. Today, I found out that the interview they conducted made its way to the Singapore Book Council blog. Go have a read! "If you think of machine writing as going by a set of rules, poetry resists those rules, which is why [AI-generated poery] won’t work." The award ceremony for the Singapore Literature Prize 2018 took place on the evening of 6 August 2018.
I didn't win. And that's fine. The biennial Singapore Literature Prize takes place this July, culminating in an awards dinner on 6 August 2018. As part of Ethos Books' efforts to promote the award (and its shortlisted titles), they conducted a series of interviews with the various shortlisted writers and the cover designers of their corresponding books.
Patricia Kurunungan, in her introduction to my poetry on poetry.sg, describes me as a cartographer of urban loneliness and desire.
What a lofty moniker. I like it. Hello Instagram user, give Ethos Books (@ethosbooks) a follow to get updates on its latest titles, sales and happenings.
By the way, Ethos Books is having a sale. Use 'FOREVER17' on checkout to get 17% off these titles when you spend above $17. Sale ends 17 December. View their sale titles here. In other news, I resuscitated my National Geographic Your Shot account recently. The account's been flagging for years, so after a recent South Africa trip I decided to share some of my travel photographs again. Go have a gander! Click here to enter.
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