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A redefining, new collection of experimental poetry from Singaporean poet Hao Guang Tse.

A breakthrough collection of experimental poetry, The International Left-Hand Calligraphy Association is a departure from Singaporean poet and author Hao Guag Tse's more formalist work that in three masterful sections explores and explodes the language of physical, social, and subconscious human experience.

Every poem in The International Left-Hand Calligraphy Association is a breath, and each breath becomes a minute, hour, week, or year. Time, for Tse, is a bale of shredded moments, and language is the great (dis)assembler. The calculated layering of the lyric is not a trick, but a redefinition of how to read and be read by the world—the sunlight, a pomelo, a crack in the earth. One will get lost in Tse’s poetry, but also find a home in the humor, histories, and happenstance he creates.
“…one feels the distinct pleasure of having discovered not just a new artist, but also a new visual language. The world, for a moment, feels completely rearranged—the best books of poems often make one feel this way.”
—Shawn Hoo, The Straits Times

“Hao Guang Tse’s terrific range of tonalities, use of page space and gaps between parts of words, & elaborate and at times off-hand layering of time and place are knocking me out. Each poem plays with certainty by letting in a measure of trembling—though the poems are always trembling precisely. The titles—and the table of contents reads like its own scrolling poem—make for a continuous sense of reset, & so I feel as if they’re guides through a set of poems that is also a long poem. One stretching itself out in a collective wake converting dislocation into a moving shape of redefinition in which strength, vision, and humor abound.”
—Anselm Berrigan

“One of the traditional missions of poetry has long consisted of inebriating your houseplants, so you can finally get to the truly critical conversations that must be had with them about fruits and small animals, Stephen Chow flicks, the zeitgeist, and the nature of consciousness, which is exactly what Hao Guang Tse does in this sunny, playful, whimsically enjambed collection.”
—Ken Chen

“A delight to read, the words beautifully aerated, one can feel the poet’s breath off the page—which renders punctuation superfluous, such is the music. The spacings too, well-paced, are pauses in the air.

One sees the content continuously being turned into form, & V.V.—a play of the abstract & concrete, light & dark, a sustained act, never heavy-handed.”
—Wong May

“…takes immense care to let the words breathe and find their own fragmented forms. These poems are neither simply free nor unfree verse, but they gesture beyond, towards more open linguistic, conceptual, aesthetic and sensorial associations.”
—Al Lim, QLRS

“Scrupulous yet imaginative, whimsical yet aesthetically coherent, TILHCA is a genre-defying, binary-straddling collection.”
—Yap Hao Yang, Suspect

“Turning the page, I stepped in, finding a miscellany of things hanging suspended in the shifting light: a dragonfly wing, the words of Simone Weil, a landfill of folded plastic triangles, a Chinese idiom unstrung and reworked, rust disappearing at the oxidation of starfruit juice.”
—Mok Zining, Asian Books Blog

“…beautifully unpredictable, risky, quizzical, open-ended…”
—Yeow Kai Chai, QLRS
Tse Hao Guang (謝皓光) is the author of The International Left-Hand Calligraphy Association (Tinfish Press, 2023) and Deeds of Light (Math Paper Press, 2015), the latter shortlisted for the 2016 Singapore Literature Prize. He edits or has edited the collaborative e-journal OF ZOOS; UnFree Verse (Ethos Books, 2017), the anthology of Singapore poetry in received and nonce forms; literary food writing anthology Food Republic (Landmark Books, 2020); and the new edition of Windham-Campbell prize-winning poet Wong May’s 1969 debut, A Bad Girl’s Book of Animals (Ethos Books, 2023). He is a 2016 International Writing Program fellow at the University of Iowa, the 2018 National Writer-in-Residence at Nanyang Technological University, a 2023 virtual resident of the National Centre for Writing at Norwich, and a 2024 Jalan Besar Fellow at Sing Lit Station. Poems and essays appear in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The Yale Review, Brick, Brick and elsewhere.

Authors

The International Left-Hand Calligraphy Association