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Look inside the book
Softblow poetry journal celebrates twelve years of publishing poetry in English, from the widely acclaimed and deeply experienced, to the freshly youthful and urgent. Curated by Cyril Wong and Jason Wee, two of the founding editors, We Contain Multitudes reflects the poet-editors’ omnivorous literary appetites and interests, and includes poems especially included for this anthology by Lawrence Lacambra Ypil, Michelle Cahill, Yasmin Belkhyr, Sharlene Teo, among others.
Featuring Singaporean talents such as Boey Kim Cheng, Christine Chia, Tania De Rozario, Joshua Ip, Jee Leong Koh, Chandran Nair, Pooja Nansi, Ng Yi-Sheng, Tse Hao Guang, Daryl Qilin Yam, Jerrold Yam, Arthur Yap and Yong Shu Hoong; and international voices such as Aazam Abidov, Sherman Alexie, Kimberly Blaeser, Ingrid de Kok, Kristine Ong Muslim, Mariko Nagai, Murat Nemet-Nejat, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Laksmi Pamuntjak, Simon Perchik, Marge Piercy, Jeet Thayil, Tim Tomlinson and Ocean Vuong.
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“This anthology chronicles the intersections of language and modernity in Singapore’s premiere international poetry journal. It offers a spell-binding array of voices, rituals and obsessions as well as insists that ‘the distance between one person and the next’ is sheer art.”
—Eric Tinsay Valles, poet, educator and director of the National Poetry Festival
“This transnational, heterogeneous collection of Softblow's deftly-curated poems builds the necessary, all-too-neglected bridges between nations and asks us to interrogate our literary contexts. These poems by a wonderful range of poets create an enthralling ethos, awakening longing and memories often felt but unnamed, transcending narrative and lyric, familiar and fresh voices. The voices here shout and echo and exclaim. How we need to hear them!”
—Sally Wen Mao, author of Mad Honey Symposium (2012 Kinereth Gensler Award)
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Jason Wee is an artist and a writer. He runs Grey Projects, an artist space, library and residency in Tiong Bahru, Singapore. His collection The Monsters Between Us (2013) was selected by TODAY newspaper as the literary pick of 2013. He wrote for and curated Singapur Unheimlich, now on view in ifa galerie Berlin. He is a co-editor of Softblow, a poetry journal.
Cyril Wong is the Singapore Literature Prize-winning author of poetry collections such as Unmarked Treasure, Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light and Satori Blues, as well as a collection of strange short fables called Let Me Tell You Something About That Night. He has served as a mentor under the Creative Arts Programme and the Mentor Access Project, as well as a judge for the Golden Point Awards in Singapore.
A past recipient of the National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award for Literature, he completed his doctoral degree in English Literature at the National University of Singapore in 2012. His books include poetry collections Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light (2007) and The Lover’s Inventory (2015), the novel The Last Lesson of Mrs de Souza (2013) and short fiction collection Ten Things My Father Never Taught Me (2014).
