After three years of plugging away at my next collection of poems, I’m really proud to say it’s finally coming into the light! Postal Code is going to launch on 4th November at the Singapore Writer’s Festival at 7 p.m., alongside Desmond Kon’s The Arbitrary Sign. Expect a special guest appearance from my former prof at NUS, Dr Rajeev Patke, as well as a reading and Q&A.
Postal Code is a book about place. It divides into five sections; broadly speaking.
Singapore
Faith
Love
Death
Endings
While the Singapore section seems to encapsulate all of the other sections thematically, I felt that it was time to return (after the nomadic wanderings of my previous book, Chai) to more home-grown issues. Hence poems about the 2011 elections, Mas Selamat, the 6.9m white paper, reservist training in the Army, and so forth.
The poems in the other sections consider other geographical places, but never quite stray from stories and experiences close to my heart.
And if you want to get a sneak peek of one of the poems, do drop by the Smoke-Filled Room this weekend. ‘Suara,’ a poem from Postal Code, is part of a collaborative work with Vikas Kailankaje. And I’ll be performing poems from Postal Code and more together with two other smashing poets, Jennifer Champion and Raksha Mahtani, on 27th October, 6pm. The gig is called Smoke-Filled Poets (naturally, right?) Come on down to get a lungful of socio-political incorrectness!
