Selfie-Friendly
Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . The Singapore Literature Prize is the top literary award in the country. The 2020 shortlist has just been announced and the category of poetry in English rightly includes the debuts of two bright young stars who have dared to craft highly experimental and yet totally absorbing books. Our SP Blog reviewer concludes that "In parsetreeforestfire Hamid Roslan has constructed an ingenious collection out of a melange of Singaporean languages." In a separate review of Marylyn Tan's Gaze Back , its reviewer enthuses that "This is a poetic collection told from the voice of the goat, from the eye on that spit, that has already been in the flames and now is going to de-code that experience for you." All the stranger then that the shortlist also includes the latest tired poetic offerings of Singapore's unofficial "poet laureate." Padded out by what the publisher calls ...