Alvin Pang



Treatment

What a treat it was to come home again ! each weekend freed from need to entreaty egress, ingress, the scarification of waiting at the gate every night for love or its proximate arrival: no, weekends were abandonment’s ceasefire, after …

Posted in 112: TREAT | Tagged

Peripheral Peripheries: Robert Wood on Alvin Pang

Here there are plastic chairs, plastic tables, phone screens, tv soaps, chicken rice, and the poem’s final word, which tells us what we have always known.

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged ,

SINGAPORE Editorial

We consciously eschewed the substantial but well-represented body of Singaporean poetry originally written in English, and instead sought out voices from Tamil, Malay, Chinese and more which have not been as well circulated in the anglophone literary world.

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged , , , , ,

Suburbia: Jurong East

Decentred centre. Regional hubnobbed, notquite heartland, more ribcaged iron lung of the body politc; working protein; a thigh muscle: hardly missioncritical, although would be missed. Or else re-placed.  Swath of brownsites, postswamped, timestubbed, grassrooted and faraway from tua por: no bigshored rickshawed …

Posted in 84: SUBURBIA | Tagged

Nori Nakagami’s ‘Dragon’s Egg’

A dragon lives in your heart. It coils around the man you love. It protects him. It will never release him, not until he meets his end. In time it will birth the world and everything that lives. This world …

Posted in TRANSLATIONS | Tagged ,

Siobhan Hodge Reviews Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia

Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia is ambitious. This anthology reads as a sample of more to come, rather than a clear achievement of the sizable task that it sets out in its introduction. Over There is not, as the title might initially suggest, a collection of travel poems, nor is it a comparison of different postcolonial reflections arising from Singapore and Australia.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged , , , ,

DJ Huppatz Reviews No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry

At Changi Airport's arrivals hall, you're greeted by the sound of birds, which is quite disconcerting at 2am. This simulated birdsong is symptomatic of the city-state's attitude to nature. For Singapore, it seems, nature is dangerous and unpredictable, better replaced with more predictable, more aesthetically pleasing technologies. Former Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew once famously asserted that the greatest invention of the 20th century was the air conditioner. Thus it is more than just an urban condition that is constructed in Singapore, it is an aesthetic condition that incorporates all aspects of life.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged , , , ,