Description

This new selection of poetry surveys over three decades of writing from renowned Singaporean poet Alvin Pang, whose formally restless and thematically broad-ranging work has been collected here for an Indian readership for the first time.

Evolving a fluid poetics and politics of language as a place of experience, his oeuvre is steeped in the tensions and intimacies of self, family, city, nation, and the everyday complexities of being human in the 21st century.

“Breathlessly nimble”

— Almost Island

“Pang’s poetry is a rich and nuanced mindfulness.”

— Amanda Mcleod Writes

“…a poetic register that is characterised not by determinacy but polyphony, fluctuating between consolation and critique, celebration and condemnation.”

                 — Poetry.SG

“Pang continues to find new ways to put language under pressure.”

— Cha Review of Books and Films

“Pang’s body of work relentlessly addresses the need for reinvention — and lifts words from the realm of noise to the realm of music.”

— Modern Literature

“His commitment to exploring complex themes of identity, belonging, and change is evident across his extensive body of work.”

— Usawa Literary Review

Alvin Pang is a poet, writer, editor, photographer and translator whose broad literary practice spans three decades of literary activities in his native Singapore and elsewhere. Featured in the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English and the Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, his writing has been translated into more than twenty languages, including volumes in Slovene, Swedish, Croatian, Macedonian, Chinese, Malay and French. A 2022 Dublin Literary Award judge and Civitella Ranieri Fellow, he has received Singapore’s Young Artist of the Year Award, the Singapore Youth Award (Arts and Culture) and the JCCI Education Award. He was a Fellow at the Iowa International Writing Program in 2002, and completed a PhD in Writing in 2020. Among numerous engagements, he is an honorary Adjunct Professor of RMIT University and serves on several editorial advisory boards. In 2017, he curated an international portfolio on the theme of Plurality for Poetry at Sangam. His recent books include What Happened: Poems 1997–2017 (2017), Uninterrupted time (2019), Diaphanous (2023), in collaboration with George Szirtes, and What Gives Us Our Names: Rosetta Edition (2024). Based in Singapore, he continues to make regular appearances in publications and events across India and around the world.