Description
About the Author

Ownself Say Ownself is a chaotic collection of new and selected poetry by Joshua Ip. Half of it is 44 poems salvaged from the award-winning, out-of- print wilderness of his first five-ish collections, marked-up with mischievous metric marginalia in the newly invented form of the tilde (tl;dr). The next half is 44 new translations, performance pieces and formal experiments written over the course of a practice research PhD. So you get the best of six-ish books for the price of one, which fortuitously sums to 88 poems.

See satirical singlish sonnets scrabble with spurned spoken word and shady pseudo-song-translations alongside snide summaries, split-screen cinemas, Song-dynasty susurrus, Scottish-civil-servant-salutations and circumlocutory sex scenes, in a singsong celebration of spurious sesquilinguality!
Joshua Ip is a Singaporean poet, editor, and literary organiser. He won the Singapore Literature Prize for his debut, sonnets from the singlish (2012), and has also published making love with scrabble tiles (2013), sonnets from the singlish UPSIZE EDITION (2015), footnotes on falling (2018), farquhar (2020), and translations to the tanglish (2021).

He won the Golden Point Award for English prose in 2013, was second for English poetry in 2011, and received an honorable mention for Chinese poetry in 2015. He has co-edited eleven literary anthologies, including the singpowrimo, a luxury we cannot afford and call and response series.

He co-founded Sing Lit Station, an overactive literary charity that runs initiatives including singpowrimo, seapowrimo and poetry.sg. He received the Young Artist Award from Singapore’s National Arts Council in 2017.

He completed his PhD in creative writing at RMIT in the practice research symposium programme in 2024.

He still wants to be a writer when he grows up.

www.joshuaip.com

Authors

Ownself Say Ownself: New and Selected Poems