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About the Author

Finalist for the 2024 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize

Chrystal Ho delivers a debut that is both urgent and intimate. Ho takes the temperature of today’s climate by casting her observant eye across art history, domestic interiors, the documented life of Agnes Joaquim, and the invisible cracks in our everyday environment.

Elsewhere, the Cosmos Cracks is a poetry collection that asks, amidst the climate crisis, how one continues to find wonder in the everyday.

Beginning from the confines of a HDB estate, the poems present a way of walking through Singapore’s landscape to find moments of reconnection across time. In pieces that reconsider public housing as a garden, revisit the well-worn story of a national flower, and return to familiar rituals and language as inherited wisdom, the collection posits that some of our answers might just be awaiting us in plain sight—so long as we learn how to look.
“Elsewhere, the Cosmos Cracks is a gift of a collection, like an entrancing field guide for what it means to belong to earth and story. These poems shimmer and braid the wild and intimate.”
—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, poet and essayist

“In these scathingly meticulous, wildly lyrical poems, Chrystal Ho dares to depict nature not as an all-too-convenient mirror to the human, but as a cipher of the completely other, and the altogether new. How might a fruit fall from a branch on a whim; how might a girl watch a bird turn to flame in order to tell the story it won’t; how might we forgive the bougainvillea enough to grow: these poems wager a kind of nature that is far deeper and older than our vision can encompass, and reveal what our most secret and wild selves dare not ask—that we have always already been part of the picture from the start.”
—Lawrence Lacambra Ypil, poet and non-fiction writer
Chrystal Ho (b. 1996) is a writer from Singapore who works with poetry and non-fiction. Her writing has been published in Portside Review, PR&TA, BiblioAsia, and Sine Theta Mag, among others. Keenly interested in exploring the interconnections between myth, language, and the environment, she is a former recipient of the NYU Shanghai Writing & Speaking Fellowship, as well as the National Library Creative Residency (Singapore). The manuscript of Elsewhere, the Cosmos Cracks was a finalist for the 2024 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize. This is her debut collection of poetry.

Authors

Elsewhere, the Cosmos Cracks