Intruder
Jerrold Yam
Singapore: Ethos Books
ISBN: 9789810913724

At home with loneliness and passing encounters, can we be familiar with another or even ourselves? Does love outweigh the uncertainty of its memory? In his third and latest collection, award-winning poet Jerrold Yam ushers us into a traveller's world through sensitive and enquiring eyes, navigating a landscape of flitting figures, thoughts and emotions.

Informed by expansive travel across Asia and Europe, Yam's poetry is as varied as his journey, exploring geysers, horse riding and Picasso, while building on his preoccupations with family, sensuality and displacement. His poems make fresh the contradictions of young adulthood, its heady mix of determined restlessness, bold insecurities, desire for intimacy and fear of commitment. In his unflinchingly honest treatment of these themes, Yam exhibits new range and complexity as he describes a shifting terrain, where moving on is as difficult as letting go.

Above all, Intruder is an attempt to make sense of the impermanent structures that hold up one’s life. Home, like love, may be a fiction that we must resist claiming for our own. After all, can we—and should we—be more than intruders?