Category: Literature

A FIELD GUIDE TO LETTING GO

“Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realisation, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back...

ON TRANSLATING EMOTION

IN THE RAIN She closes her eyes,allowing her candlelit thoughts of him to transmutestone to silver andrain to gently glowing pearls. Orbs, softly shining,swirl into theconstellation of his smile,lining his twinkling eyesand cradling his dimples. She smiles as well,hugged by kindmoonlight folded intoa heart, thumpingunderneath a warm chest. A...

STANDING ROOM ONLY

THERE WAS A TIME when everything that was new and different was also compelling. A new bakery in the neighbourhood was a thing to be excited about. It brought with it the promise of mornings soaked in crisp aromas of fresh loaves and exchanges of light banter between neighbours on...

SINCE MEMORY IS FIRST

FEATURING CHERYL JULIA LEE THE MYTH OF Orpheus and Eurydice ends in tragedy, when Eurydice becomes lost to Orpheus for eternity – because of his singular act of looking back when he was not supposed to. Is looking back always a bad thing? Perhaps not, as Cheryl Julia Lee indicates...

FOR THE ESOTERIC AND UNDEFINED

WHEN ONE ENCOUNTERS a local printing press, one would immediately assume that it publishes local writers, because that is what local presses do, right? It certainly seems that way if one looks at the most popular publishers in Singapore thus far. This is not so for Delere Press, a boutique press...

TO TRAVEL IS TO LIVE

ANY TRAVEL GUIDE does one thing well: it tells us where we ought to go and see but never truly captures the real experience that pans out. That’s how Afterglobe Magazine is different from travel books. It doesn’t seek to be a laundry list of to-dos. In fact, it’s very...

A CONFUSION OF HAPPINESS

THE FIRST PUBLIC notice that Michelle Tan had published her first collection of poetry is a Facebook post that Kenny Leck, owner and publisher of Books Actually and Math Paper Press, tagged her in. “Am very very PROUD & HAPPY to be given the chance to be publishing two very awesome poetry collections,”...

A SHARPENED PENCIL

FEATURING POOJA NANSI “POETRY IS HOW SHE FOUND HER VOICE AND LEARNED TO SAY WHAT NEEDED TO BE SAID.” “I AM STILL WRITING my way towards a place where I fit,” Pooja Nansi quotes on Facebook, a line from Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist. These words resonate with her, a writer with her own brand of emotive...

THINKING ALOUD

UNDER THE ‘ABOUT’ section on Jennifer Anne Champion’s website, it is written that she is a performance poet and writer. While the website contains an extensive and impressive repertoire of her personal milestones in Singapore’s arts and cultural scene, who would have known that her foray into spoken word was...

AN INTRUSION INTO THE MIND OF A POET

Intruder Back when I could stare without bitterness,my brain easy enough for toying a newfangled sceneor surprise, I would hop on a train towatch meadows swim by,mud slathered on fieldslike toffee, my reflection in the glasslighted by the novelty of the countryside. For a moment there is no shamein becoming my...