Song of a Reformed Headhunter

  My voice is eternal, according to editor Bbp Hosmillo in his FB announcement. Thanks for featuring my work in your first spotlight feature of QUEER SOUTHEAST ASIA . Three Palinodes in the Voice of My Dead Father: one about my father seeing all Indians as the same Indian in the afterlife; one about my father and WWII; and one about his ball pein hammer and other tools. Download the PDF to read the poems in full.   Tania De Rozario, whose hybrid memoir AND THE WALLS COME CRUMBLING DOWN, was released in the US by Gaudy Boy last September, is featured too. Heartbreaking essay about how her church tried to exorcise her queerness out of her, and the failure of family to protect her from the violation. Particularly poignant is the moment when her grandmother smashed up a beloved painting of The Last Supper because she was told that it was an artifact of idolatry.  

 Weekly column for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . A warm welcome to Singapore Unbound's weekly newsletter to everyone who is joining us fresh from the 2020 Singapore Literature Festival in NYC. Here you will find more news and discussions of the topics of democracy, freedom of expression, and equal rights, and of your favorite authors from the festival. The videos of all the festival events, including the festival previews, are now available for viewing on a special festival playlist on YouTube . You can enjoy listening to the speakers now at your own leisure. If you have found an event particularly interesting, you could organize your own viewing party with friends and discuss the the ideas about literature and politics raised by festival speakers, such as Tanie De Rozario, Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha, Nuraliah Norasid, Ricco Villanuea Siasoco, Amanda Lee Koe, Paula Mendoza, Aimee Liu, and Meira Chand. The Opening Address by PJ Thum "Is There Hope ...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Singapore Unbound is holding our 4th Singapore Literature Festival from October 1-3, 2020. To be held online for the first time, this independent, biennial festival brings together Singaporean and American authors and audiences for lively conversations about literature and society. All events are free and open to everyone. The theme of this year's festival is "The Politics of Hope." Singapore Unbound wishes to respond to this fraught moment not only in Singapore and the USA but also around the world. Everywhere, democracy, human rights, and social justice are facing existential threats, and we want to provide writers and thinkers a platform to speak to the current global turmoil.   Check out the full festival program . RSVP early for the Zoom link and extras (excerpts, interviews, updates).   Festival highlights   Timely, Pertinent Topics The festival is bo...

Finished reading Anna Burns' Milkman today. I liked it very much. Henry Abelove gave me the book when he came to our holiday party. My Goodreads review: A revelation. How does one convey the emotional numbness that the unlikely heroine, Middle Sister, puts up to protect against the various invasive forms of violence in her Belfast community in the 1970s? By showing the constant struggle to maintain the shield, always in danger of slipping because of one's curiosity, anger, fear, and love, if not battered down by communal conflict. The language, repetitive, idiosyncratic, in one word, paranoid, immerses the reader in Middle Sister's consciousness. The immersion is complete with the voices of other members of the community, filtered through Middle Sister's consciousness in such a way that they are always at least potentially echoes of her own dilemma, figures of her own splitting. Today I also got to page 95 of Asad Haider's Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the...

My collection of zuihitsu The Pillow Book has been shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. It joins five other works in the shortlis t for the category of English Poetry. The other works are Cordelia by Grace Chia, The Viewing Party by Yong Shu Hoong, Circle Line by Theophilus Kwek, Tender Delirium by Tania De Rozario and Sonnets from the Singlish by Joshua Ip. I am grateful to Michael Schmidt for first publishing the work in PN Review , and to Kenny Leck and the Math Paper Press team for publishing it as part of their Babette's Feast chapbook series. The prizewinner will be announced at the Awards Ceremony, during the Singapore Writers Festival in Singapore on November 4.

Tender Delirium  I close the book in bed the moon is up

Math Paper Press re-issues my first book of poems Payday Loans in a beautiful new edition designed by Shellen Teh, with a new critical preface by Joshua Ip and an interview with me conducted by Chloe Miller for Eclectica Magazine. To launch the book, I read at BooksActually's reading series "An Evening with..." on Saturday, July 26. Ian Chung moderated the session, asking me questions about each of my books that I read from. I was really pleased to see familiar and new faces in the audience. I won't remember everyone, so my apologies in advance, but here are the faces that flash across my mind: Robert Yeo, Leong Liew Geok, Toh Hsien Min, Zhang Ruihe, Shawn Chua, Tania De Rozario and her lovely partner, Chong Li Chuan, Boedi Widjaja and his gracious wife, Weetz and his partner .... Shawn took the photo of me and Kenny's cat.

Open Letter Regarding the National Library’s Book Ban What the National Library has done—banning, and pulping, three children’s books because they depict untraditional families—horrifies and saddens me. I love the National Library, first in its original Stamford Road edition, and then in its modern translation in Bras Basah, for its vast repository of knowledge and pleasure. But the “generous giver,” as poet Edwin Thumboo calls it in his poem on the old library, has now taken away with a closed fist, and not just taken away, but will destroy the books. I feel the destruction on the pulse because I identify as gay. All the ways in which the state, supported by an apparent majority of citizens, criminalize and discriminate against the LGBT community have not hit home as hard as this act of vandalism. The object to be pulped is so innocuous. And Tango Makes Three , one of the three books, is about a pair of male penguins hatching an egg and caring for the chick. ...