- 114: NO THEME 13with J Toledo & C Tse 113: INVISIBLE WALLSwith A Walker & D Disney 112: TREATwith T Dearborn 111: BABYwith S Deo & L Ferney 110: POP!with Z Frost & B Jessen 109: NO THEME 12with C Maling & N Rhook 108: DEDICATIONwith L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik 107: LIMINALwith B Li 106: OPENwith C Lowe & J Langdon 105: NO THEME 11with E Grills & E Stewart 104: KINwith E Shiosaki 103: AMBLEwith E Gomez and S Gory 102: GAMEwith R Green and J Maxwell 101: NO THEME 10with J Kinsella and J Leanne 100: BROWNFACE with W S Dunn 99: SINGAPOREwith J Ip and A Pang 97 & 98: PROPAGANDAwith M Breeze and S Groth 96: NO THEME IXwith M Gill and J Thayil 95: EARTHwith M Takolander 94: BAYTwith Z Hashem Beck 93: PEACHwith L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong 92: NO THEME VIIIwith C Gaskin 91: MONSTERwith N Curnow 90: AFRICAN DIASPORAwith S Umar 89: DOMESTICwith N Harkin 88: TRANSQUEERwith S Barnes and Q Eades 87: DIFFICULTwith O Schwartz & H Isemonger 86: NO THEME VIIwith L Gorton 85: PHILIPPINESwith Mookie L and S Lua 84: SUBURBIAwith L Brown and N O'Reilly 83: MATHEMATICSwith F Hile 82: LANDwith J Stuart and J Gibian 81: NEW CARIBBEANwith V Lucien 80: NO THEME VIwith J Beveridge 57.1: EKPHRASTICwith C Atherton and P Hetherington 57: CONFESSIONwith K Glastonbury 56: EXPLODE with D Disney 55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUSwith M Chakraborty and K MacCarter 55: FUTURE MACHINES with Bella Li 54: NO THEME V with F Wright and O Sakr 53.0: THE END with P Brown 52.0: TOIL with C Jenkins 51.1: UMAMI with L Davies and Lifted Brow 51.0: TRANSTASMAN with B Cassidy 50.0: NO THEME IV with J Tranter 49.1: A BRITISH / IRISH with M Hall and S Seita 49.0: OBSOLETE with T Ryan 48.1: CANADA with K MacCarter and S Rhodes 48.0: CONSTRAINT with C Wakeling 47.0: COLLABORATION with L Armand and H Lambert 46.1: MELBOURNE with M Farrell 46.0: NO THEME III with F Plunkett 45.0: SILENCE with J Owen 44.0: GONDWANALAND with D Motion 43.1: PUMPKIN with K MacCarter 43.0: MASQUE with A Vickery 42.0: NO THEME II with G Ryan 41.1: RATBAGGERY with D Hose 41.0: TRANSPACIFIC with J Rowe and M Nardone 40.1: INDONESIA with K MacCarter 40.0: INTERLOCUTOR with L Hart 39.1: GIBBERBIRD with S Gory 39.0: JACKPOT! with S Wagan Watson 38.0: SYDNEY with A Lorange 37.1: NEBRASKA with S Whalen 37.0: NO THEME! with A Wearne 36.0: ELECTRONICA with J Jones
Kim Cheng Boey
Introduction to Kim Cheng Boey’s The Singer and Other Poems
BUY YOUR COPY HERE In this work of a mature artist, Kim Cheng Boey’s characteristic style – literary, allusive, memoirist, with a flâneur’s sensibility – is on full display. The book’s triptych staging – ‘Little India Dreaming’, ‘The Middle Distance’ …
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Kim Cheng Boey, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Zoë Sadokierski
Staying Alive
in memory of James Peden Massachusetts The first homegoing song I knew, though I didn’t know where it was they wanted to get home to. I was new in the class, transplanted from a Chinese school and learning the strange …
Posted in 86: NO THEME VII
Tagged Kim Cheng Boey
EXPLODE Editorial: Awfully Passionate Egregious Demagogueries … reflections on absolutes, straying, anguish and bees
If poets are in the business of cultivating ‘voice’ then, logically enough, to which ends? Is there an onus not only to learn how to speak but to also become versed in what to speak of?
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Cassandra Atherton, Dan Disney, Kim Cheng Boey
On the Sidewalk: Towards an Ethopoetics of the Streets
In his prose poem ‘The Eyes of the Poor,’ Baudelaire stages a Parisian tableau that brings together the disenfranchised poor and the privileged bourgeoisie in an awkward moment of encounter. The lyric / narrative ‘I’ and his female companion were …
Time is a river, time is a bridge
Time is a river that passes through you, crossing and recrossing, rippling score of silence under the bridges of your life, and you wonder if it can be the same river or the same person twice, the amber glide of …
Posted in 77: EXPLODE
Tagged Kim Cheng Boey
Kim Cheng Boey Reviews Eileen Chong
In a suite of three poems praising the legendary beauty, Consort Yang Guifei, the Tang poet Li Bai draws on the virtues of the peony, a flower that with its luxuriant petals and luminous colours embodies feminine beauty and allure.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Eileen Chong, Kim Cheng Boey, Li-Young Lee
Justin Clemens Reviews Poetry and the Trace
Sometimes irritating, often informative, occasionally incisive and sporadically genuinely interrogatory, the thoughtfulness evinced by (many of) the writings collected in Poetry and the Trace triggers further chains of association and dissociation. This is a genuinely critical collection in various senses of that word: at once analytic, hortatory, and urgent.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged ann vickery, Bonny Cassidy, David McCooey, Elizabeth Wilson, Emily Bitto, Emily Finlay, Jessica L. Wilkinson, John Hawke, John Kinsella, john tranter, Justin Clemens, Kate Fagan, Kate Lilley, Keri Glastonbury, Kim Cheng Boey, Lionel Fogarty, Melissa Boyd, Melissa Hardie, Nina Philadelphoff-Puren, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Simon West, Susan Stewart, Thomas Ford
Kate Middleton Reviews Kim Cheng Boey
With Clear Brightness Kim Cheng Boey offers a slim volume that, in addition to addressing notions of place, exile and travel, carries with it a deep melancholy of being written in ‘the lone wastes of middle age’. His explorations of worldliness are welcome, and Boey offers portraits of interconnectedness even as he displays and explores alienation. Moving from markets to Chinatowns, from Singapore’s National Theatre to California’s Santa Barbara, this collection often shows the objects that connect the past to the present, keepsakes available to keepers and gleaners alike.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Kate Middleton, Kim Cheng Boey
Timothy Yu Reviews Contemporary Asian Australian Poets
A decade ago, Cordite Poetry Review asked me to write a review of its tenth issue, ‘Location: Asia-Australia.’ In my review, I wrote that while the issue did a splendid job of showing the intersection between two separate places called ‘Asia’ and ‘Australia,’ it was less clear whether the ‘Asian-Australian’ could also be a thing unto itself, a kind of writing that might be visible within domestic as well as international spaces.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Adam Aitken, Kim Cheng Boey, Michelle Cahill, Timothy Yu
Review Short: Toby Davidson’s Beast Language
In the introduction to the collected poems of Francis Webb, Toby Davidson observes that the immediate influences behind Webb’s poems ‘do not supersede his locales.’ Webb’s poems are informed by a topophilia, a love of place and its ambient lore, a topographical attentiveness to detail that includes not just spatial but also temporal resonances. Davidson has inherited this attentiveness to space and place, and his debut collection, Beast Language, attempts a topo or ecopoetics that traverses a spectrum of geographies, mapping the Australian continent from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific seaboard, attempting not only terrestrial readings but taking cosmological measurements as well.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Kim Cheng Boey, Toby Davidson
Asian Australian Diasporic Poets: A Commentary
This essay provides a survey of the poetry of some Asian Australian poets, and does not attempt to be definitive. Diasporic poetics raise more questions than they answer and are just as much about dis-placement as about place, just as much about a ‘poetics of uncertainty’ as about certainties of style/nation/identity.
Nick Terrell Reviews Kim Cheng Boey
In 1997, Kim Cheng Boey's feelings of alienation from his homeland had reached critical mass. After years of watching the Singapore of his childhood succumb to ‘the cycle of tear and build that is the philosophy of progress,' he emigrated to Australia. Boey has had four collections of poetry published and won numerous awards. His early collections, Somewhere Bound (1989) and Another Place (1992), earned him high esteem in his homeland.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Kim Cheng Boey, Nick Terrell, singapore
