Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . From the age of seven to twelve, I attended a primary school at the foot of Mount Faber. The wrongly named mountain was a mere hill, and the school was so small that you could have missed it when you drove past to the scenic views at the top of the second highest point of Singapore. There were only two classes at each grade level, and so almost everyone knew almost everyone, and the teachers knew us all. I didn't know then how lucky we were. We had so much attention and so many opportunities to do stuff because there were so few of us. One of the things stuck in my mind was a stage production of "Three Little Pigs." I wanted to be the Wolf, I was certainly tall enough, but I was the Little Pig who lived in a house made of brick. For consolation, I got to boil the pot of water that killed the Wolf, after which I joined hands with my two fellow Piglets and danced around the pot and sang "So Who'...

Weekly column for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . We're pleased to announce that the 3rd Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize is now open for your entries. The Prize is awarded annually to an unpublished manuscript of original Anglophone poetry by an author of Asian heritage residing anywhere in the world. The winner receives book publication and USD1,000.00. Past winners were Lawrence Lacambra Ypil and Jenifer Sang Eun Park (2018 co-winners selected by Wong May), and Paula Mendoza (2019 winner selected by Vijay Seshadri). This year, we're honored to have the poet, fictionist, and critic Cyril Wong judge the prize. Cyril Wong is the Singapore Literature Prize-winning author of poetry collections, Unmarked Treasure and The Lover’s Inventory. A past recipient of the National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award for Literature, his poems have appeared in anthologies by Norton and Everyman’s Library, and have been translated into various languages. You can find the guide...

The second edition of the Second Saturdays reading series was hosted last night by Paul and Al. It was a pleasure to hear Vijay Seshadri read from 3 Sections . Other readers were very good too. Ten readers, but the hour went by quickly. Colin Goh's rendition of the Lord's Prayer into Singlish was hilarious, without being disrespectful. He and Damon Chua each read an extract from their stories in the forthcoming collection Singapore Noir . Marcus Yi read a satirical piece and Teo Kiat Sing read a darker poem by Marcus. Eric Norris read two fine poems, one about Kyoto, and one after Horace. Kenneth Lim read his well-turned poems about love. Christine Chia read a couple of new poems that strongly linked political and romantic disunion. Halfway through, Teo Mei Ann led us in creating a piece of collaborative theater. Contributing one line each, we wrote a discontinuous narrative about coming together as a community. spring wind I can go left or right

Vijay's third collection, and it's well worth waiting for. The book is marvelous, constantly surprising. I enjoyed again the lacerating "Memoir" (which first appeared in The New Yorker ) and the three apocalyptic visions of "This Morning" (which I first heard at a PSA reading). "Three Persons" is still a particular favorite. The theme of containing multitudes recurs in different guises throughout the book, culminating in the transformative ending of "Personal Essay," where the faces seen in a trance are themselves and more than themselves. I also love the memoir "Pacific Fishes of Canada" and will be sharing it with a colleague who teaches Moby Dick. The book takes many risks in its language--colloquial, mythic, sentimental, scientific--but rides the waves through the energy of its sentences.

Jee Leong Koh is a vigorous, physical poet very much captured by the expressive power of rhythm, rhetoric, and the lexicon. He is also, paradoxically, a poet in pursuit of the most elusive and delicate of human emotions. The contradiction is wonderful and compelling, and so are his poems. --Vijay Seshadri, Author of The Long Meadow (Graywolf Press)