One Fierce Hour
Alfian Sa'at
Singapore: Landmark Books, 2014
ISBN: 9789814189552

One Fierce Hour is Alfian Sa'at's first and breakout work. It was hailed as 'truly a landmark' for Singaporean poetry when it was published in 1998. The collection, which has entered the canon of Singapore literature, contains the anti-anthem "Singapore You Are Not My Country". Alfian remains an intelligent writer with an unabashedly social and political voice. He has written 37 plays, 3 works of prose and 2 poetry anthologies.

A Luxury We Cannot Afford: An Anthology of Singapore Poetry
Christine Chia & Joshua Ip (eds.)
Singapore: Math Paper Press, 2014
ISBN: 9789810926533

Singapore is a country of many invented, transplanted, or self-made myths and fables, but one looms above them all. 1969 marks the famous declaration of the myth: "Poetry is a luxury we cannot afford."

As our island nation approaches its 50th anniversary wielding extraordinary wealth and prosperity, it is timely to review the narrative that has shepherded us through the past half-century. Indeed, it seems only poetic justice to examine this polarising mythos through the ballyhooed medium of poetry. To praise and appraise this most poetic of figures, 56 of Singapore's finest poets offer up 65 poems that promise to excite, exhilarate, and electrify, to a man.

SingPoWriMo: The Anthology
Ann Ang, Joshua Ip, & Pooja Nansi (eds.)
Singapore: Math Paper Press, 2014
ISBN: 9789810926526

Singapore Poetry Writing Month, or as we affectionately call it, SingPoWriMo.

Write one poem a day for thirty days in the cruel month of April: that was the challenge thrown open to the wilderness of the interwebz. This anthology brings together the best of the hundreds of poems that were submitted, from verses written in response to fiendish "include-all-these-six-words-in-your-poem" challenges, to impromptu poems written on whim. In the spirit of the democratic process of poetry, we feature first-time poets beside established ones, and blackout poems besides long-forgotten forms such as the liwuli.

Coastlands
Aaron Lee Soon Yong
Singapore: Ethos Books, 2014
ISBN: 9789810924782

Coastlands is Aaron Lee's third collection of poetry. Whether in a small town or frenetic city, the poet has never lived far from the sea. This book documents his life experience as a pilgrim still finding his place in the wider world. In these fifty poems he recollects, explores, embraces and anticipates what is lost and found in each of the places he calls home: Malaysia, Singapore and Hawaii. Everywhere, natural and urban landscapes anchor and influence his identity and connect him to humanity.

In ancient writings "coastlands" means the far reaches of the earth -- places accessible only by crossing oceans of unknown magnitude. Truly, life is a voyage from which the traveller never returns.

Changes and Chances
Leonard Ng
Singapore: Ethos Books, 2014
ISBN: 9789810925123

Uncompromising yet accessible, the six sequences in Changes and Chances explore love, sorrow, time, nature, and humanity. By turns passionate, hermetic, and heartbreaking, they simultaneously endure and celebrate all the imperfections of the world. Leonard Ng blends free verse with adaptations of both Western and Asian forms to create a musical poetry grounded in the traditions of both East and West.

Saga Seeds
Patricia Maria de Souza
Singapore: Ethos Books, 2014
ISBN: 9789810794828

Saga Seeds is Patricia Maria Tan's latest poetry collection. The title of her book refers most aptly to her poems, taut red beads of memory and observation. Nostalgic references such as masak masak transport readers to a time when children played five stones and games involving pure imagination. The personal recollections serve as a tribute to Singapore and our collective memories. We also find poems alive with the beauty of simple folk and nature, and poems awake to darker moods and events. Throughout the lyrical excursion, readers are borne by the poet's steady and reassuring voice, into the intricacies of introspection, and towards a fuller appreciation of the exquisiteness of everyday moments.

Sound of Mind: A Teacher-Writers Anthology of Poems and Prompts
Philip McConnell and Genevieve Wong (eds.)
Singapore: Ethos Books, 2014
ISBN: 9789810922719

This is an exciting offering of poems from a constellation of teacher-writers, including published and familiar authors such as Ann Ang, Ken Mizusawa, Eric Tinsay Valles, Christine Chia, Heng Siok Tian, David Leo and Oliver Seet.

What makes this anthology worth the reader's precious time is more than the poets' acuity of perception, and their particularities of style; being educators, they have contributed with a view to inspiring the reader's imagination. The poems have been arranged in a manner to stimulate the creative writer in each and every reader.

Red Pulse II: Poetry to a Local Beat
Kevin Lam and Tan Xiang Yeow (eds.)
Singapore: Ethos Books, 2014
ISBN: 9789810923464

Red Pulse II is a rich chronicle illuminating the growth of twenty‐two young Singapore poets, who, as a community, write to shape and order private and collective, national worlds, to reconcile tensions within fragile and fraught relationships, and to split open unspoken pasts toward a future forward in poems that crystallise philosophy, pain and play.

Separation: A History
Christine Chia
Singapore: Ethos Books, 2014
ISBN: 9789810913717

The sequel to The Law of Second Marriages, the best-selling and critically acclaimed poetry book by Christine. With "terrifying sparseness and intensity", as Cyril Wong observes, Christine threads together stories of the Separation between Singapore and Malaysia with the separation between her parents. Her searing vision, ambitious and intimate, opens up emotional spaces in unlikely places.

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?

Local Anaesthetic: A Painless Approach to Singaporean Poetry: A Lower Secondary Teaching Guide for Teachers by Teachers
Pooja Nansi & Erin Woodford
Singapore: Ethos Books, 2014
ISBN: 9789810904159

This is the book for every teacher who has ever wanted to introduce Singaporean Poetry in their Literature classroom but didn't feel confident enough about doing it.

This guide, written by teachers for teachers, presents a painless and flexible approach to designing a unit around teaching Singaporean poetry in a way that is tailored to your own classroom. You will find a detailed guide to each poem and suggestions for how to teach them thematically or by difficulty level or even for the specific purpose of helping your students understand a particular poetic device – this allows you to choose the approach which works best for your classroom. And since we understand the daily grind of being a teacher, we've also provided ready‐to‐use lesson plans and guides for your convenience.

Ultimately, we all want our students to see that poetry isn't scary or unapproachable. The easiest way to understand anything is to begin with what we know and because many of the poems in this guide deal with a world that is familiar, they also provide an accessible launch pad from which students and teachers can explore poems from many other parts of the world together.

Fear No Poetry!: The Essential Guide to Close Reading
Gwee Li Sui
Singapore: Ethos Books, 2014
ISBN: 9789810904142

Afraid of poetry? Unable to make sense of a poem, let alone enjoy it? Having trouble discussing the web of meanings within a poem or, worse, writing about it? Confused by the kooky critical terms readers and teachers keep throwing around?

Fear no longer! Literary powerhouse Gwee Li Sui takes you from the baby steps of close reading to its finer, more moving moments. He discusses with rare energising generosity two kinds of poems: the “unseen poem” – the bane of many a student – and the scariest of verse for Singaporean readers, a poem by another Singaporean!

This book assumes nothing, starting with the basics. It aims to help you find your inner posture, grasp what a poem is and does, learn the critical language, and write competently. The book further comes jam‐packed with exercises for you to work on alone or with a few friends…

Read it as a guide, use it in the classroom, or argue with it in a reading group. Take on the challenge of FEAR NO POETRY! – and get ready to toughen your skills in close analysis as a new world of poetry and life explodes!

Seasonal Disorders/Impractical Lessons
Paul Tan
Singapore: Landmark Books, 2014
ISBN: 9789814189545

Paul Tan's fourth collection shuttles between two metropolises. In Tokyo, the new and the picturesque compete with the alienation of cosmopolitan life, while in Singapore, the familiar often sharpens the irony and cynicism of urban society.

At turns epigrammatic and thoughtful, or self-doubting and witty, these poems are a reminder of poetry's ability to connect the deeply personal with the larger narratives of country and culture.

One Thousand and One Nights: Love Poems
Gwee Li Sui
Singapore: Landmark Books, 2014
ISBN: 9789814189538

From the poet’s Preface:
"When love ends, what do you keep? Some autumns ago, I met a remarkable woman and we fell in love. She is a Korean novelist, I a Singaporean poet. Across oceans of differences and the habits of age, we forged a way to love and to keep faith. Then, as mysteriously as it all started, it ended about a thousand and one nights later.

Modern storytellers beguile us. They bring such freshness to the endings of tales that we willingly hold our breaths in a promise of them. But the best bits are in the middle where often it feels like the adventure can never die. Every day is vast with possibilities as the heart marvels at the new way it beats. These are what I keep."

Standing in the Corner: Poems From a Real Childhood
Anne Lee Tzu Pheng
Singapore: Landmark Books, 2014
ISBN: 9789814189521

Does the word "childhood" call up mushy sentiments and nostalgic memories where time has given a rosy glow to what has long gone?

This collection presents a different side to Singapore's award-winning poet who sets out to recall a real childhood, where children are not the little innocents people think all children are, and growing up is full of hazards, not the least of which is the author herself, recalling some of her experiences growing up in the 1950s.

Soul's Festival: Collected Poems 1980-1997
Anne Lee Tzu Pheng
Singapore: Landmark Books, 2014
ISBN: 9789814189514

This collection brings together in one volume, the author's first four volumes of poetry which have long been out of print: Prospect Of A Drowning (1980), Against The Next Wave (1988), The Brink Of An Amen (1991), and Lambada By Galilee & Other Surprises (1997). These won her numerous awards and international recognition, including the Singapore Cultural Medallion for Literature (1985), the SEA (South East Asia) WRITE Award 1987, and the Gabriela Mistral Award (1995) from the Republic of Chile. The author has gone on to publish more recent volumes, but readers will welcome the re-publication of this earlier work which ensured her reputation as Singapore's foremost woman poet of international stature.

Little Things: An Anthology of Poetry
Loh Chin Ee, Angelia Poon, and Esther Vincent (eds.)
Singapore: Ethos Books, 2013
ISBN: 9789810771409

Catching crickets after school, waiting for class to end, playing with lanterns during Mid-Autumn festival, observing one’s grandfather cut his nails, watching the rain and the world go by – these are some of the little things that the poems in this anthology explore.

In this selection of more than 80 poems from Singapore and around the world, poets look afresh at things mundane and universal, from birth to growing up and first love to old age and death. Works by established Singapore poets such as Boey Kim Cheng, Lee Tzu Pheng, Arthur Yap and Cyril Wong and well-known international poets such as e. e. cummings, Billy Collins, Derek Walcott and Raymond Carver are set alongside poems by younger published poets such as Joshua Ip, Teng Qian Xi and Theophilus Kwek and previously unpublished poems in this refreshing anthology.

Arranged in six broad sections – Little Things, Growing Up, People Around Us, Going Places, Love and Loss, and On Words – this anthology will appeal to readers both young and old with poems that are quirky, delightful, sad and reflective.

The Viewing Party
Yong Shu Hoong
Singapore: Ethos Books, 2013
ISBN: 9789810776947

Singapore Literature Prize winner Yong Shu Hoong’s latest book features more than just poetry. There is also a ghostly tale at its core, complete with prose poems and micro fiction of exactly 100 words each, as well as annotated excerpts from an abandoned work.

In this viewing party, readers are invited to take a peek into the domain of death and cinema. You are part of a mob of dispassionate onlookers. Sometimes, you get to play the voyeuristic judge.

After You
Cyril Wong
Singapore: Math Paper Press, 2013
ISBN: 9789810772741

In a lasting marriage, one could still outlive the other. A poet gazes upon his older partner, pondering the inevitable. Panic, heartache, and a surprising sense of acceptance, interwoven with instances of joyful resilience, punctuate the ordinariness of their everyday lives and occupy these poems about same-sex love, death, and the fragile art of testimony.

My Burning Hill
Rosaly Puthucheary
Singapore: Ethos Books, 2012
ISBN: 9789810741426

My Burning Hill is a long poem in fifty-six sections. Dr Rosaly Puthucheary wrote this long poem while taking on the perspective of her late brother, Dr James Puthucheary, who played a major role in Singapore's fight for independence from the British. Dr Rosaly puts into lyrical form, the motivation and actions of the towering figure of a man driven by a great purpose.

In this reflective and retrospective musing, the writer moves from one pertinent moment in the political history of Singapore since 1942 to another. By interlacing these political events with the depth of memory, the writer exalts the significance of each moment, both pleasant and unpleasant. The reader will also understand the sacrifices and struggles that are expected from individuals who have dedicated their lives to a great purpose.