Cordelia
• Cordelia was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize 2014 (English Poetry Category).
Cordelia, Grace Chia’s second poetry collection, excavates from the imagery of life, art and modernity to create a mélange of fragmented colours in remembering the past, musing on the present and imagining the fantastic. The voice of the poet is visceral yet contemplative, sensual and surreal; it lingers with a satisfying piquancy long after it’s heard.
Cordelia
Slide to see
Paperback
$18.00 SGD
Reviews
"These poems are prickly to fierce and fiery affairs, more seasoned arrows than gems, thrusting into the skin of pretense and complacency. Passionate and uncompromising, Grace Chia is a poet who prefers to reveal what others work hard to conceal, with some carnage and hard-earned truths to decorate her pages." – Cyril Wong, author of The Dictator's Eyebrow, Let Me Tell You Something About the Night and Unmarked Treasure
“Cordelia is the long-awaited second book by émigré Grace Chia, the only female voice in the enigmatic third wave of Singapore poets. With the sinister urgency and contemporary humanism of Cordelia, Grace completes the critical arc initiated by womango, to seal her reputation as the Sylvia Plath of Singapore." – Daren Shiau, author of Heartland, Peninsular: Archipelagos and Other Islands and Velouria.
“It is rare to get such a range of experience in a single collection of poems. There are four sections: each looks a different way into different experiences with a different rhythm, style and degree of distance from the subject; like different neighbourhoods of the same city. Throughout, there is a real sense of a single life, highly varied and intensively lived, perceived and recorded. It does this without fear. Grace’s name in Mandarin is translated as "demure cloud" but the collection starts with a thunderstorm of emotions and perceptions, frantic, raucous and sometimes comic. As you move through the book, you will encounter social poems, family poems, travel poems, coming home poems, music poems, poetry poems and childbirth poems but the ones that cut the deepest into the reader's consciousness are poems of love and desire. They are open and direct and you cannot avoid their unaffected power.” – Timothy O’ Grady, author of I Could Read The Sky and Motherland.
“These poems pull electricity up from the magmatic earth and down from an ether crawling with myth and dream. They’re abundantly playful, riding hard on accelerated blood and jumpy nerves through broad, wild soundscapes. The passions written here are intimate but never closed. The poet brings the reader into a close and lively experience of the body and its layered realms as she roves from igloos to volcanoes to the rivers and quays of home. Home may never be quite familiar to this curious, unsettling gaze, but its pleasures, like many others, are richly rendered here.” – Jen Crawford, author of Bad Appendix and Napolean Swings
Recommended Books
Paperback
$18.60 SGD
E-book
$18.60 SGD
Blood Collected Stories
Paperback
$25.00 SGD
E-book
$25.00 SGD
Brown is Redacted: Reflecting on Race in Singapore
Paperback
$19.00 SGD
Paperback (autographed)
$19.00 SGD
Floating Clouds Beyond The Elastic Limit
Paperback
$19.00 SGD
Paperback (autographed)
$19.00 SGD
A Flying Crystal
Paperback
$19.00 SGD
A Walk With My Pig
Poetry
Paperback
$19.00 SGD
Paperback (autographed)
$19.00 SGD
Floating Clouds Beyond The Elastic Limit
Paperback
$19.00 SGD
Paperback (autographed)
$19.00 SGD
A Flying Crystal
Paperback
$19.00 SGD
A Walk With My Pig
Paperback
$18.60 SGD
E-book
$18.60 SGD
A Bad Girl's Book of Animals
E-book
$0.00 SGD
Paperback
$21.00 SGD
Picking off new shoots will not stop the spring: Witness poems and essays from Burma/Myanmar (1988-2021)
Paperback
$19.00 SGD
E-book
$19.00 SGD
The Orchid Folios
E-book
$0.00 SGD
Some Say, A Tapir
E-book
$0.00 SGD
Farquhar
Paperback
$16.00 SGD
Poetry Moves: An Anthology of Poetry
Paperback
$20.56 SGD
Contour: A Lyric Cartography of Singapore
Paperback
$28.04 SGD
To Gather Your Leaving: Asian Diaspora Poetry from America, Australia, UK and Europe
Paperback
$16.82 SGD
E-book
$16.82 SGD
parsetreeforestfire
Paperback
$28.00 SGD
A Gathering of Themes
Paperback
$14.00 SGD
E-book
$14.00 SGD
a tiny space
Paperback
$17.00 SGD
E-book
$17.00 SGD
Right of the Soil
Paperback
$16.82 SGD
E-book
$16.82 SGD
GAZE BACK
Paperback
$28.00 SGD
E-book
$28.00 SGD
Common Life: Drawings and Poems
Paperback
$23.36 SGD
UnFree Verse
Paperback
$16.00 SGD
E-book
$16.00 SGD
Lost Bodies: Poems between Portugal and Home
Paperback
$18.70 SGD
This Is Not A Safety Barrier: An Anthology of Poetry & Photography
Paperback
$18.00 SGD
I Found A Bone and Other Poems
Paperback
$12.00 SGD
E-book
$12.00 SGD
Me Migrant
Paperback
$16.00 SGD
E-book
$16.00 SGD
Giving Ground
Paperback
$16.00 SGD
E-book
$16.00 SGD
Phedra
Paperback
$18.60 SGD
E-book
$18.60 SGD
Spomenik
Paperback
$16.00 SGD
E-book
$16.00 SGD
Bitter Punch
Paperback
$10.00 SGD
Singapore Notebook & Blessed Isle
Paperback
$25.00 SGD
UNION : 15 Years of Drunken Boat, 50 Years of Writing From Singapore
Paperback
$16.00 SGD
Ars Poetica for the Day
Paperback
$16.00 SGD
Do You Live In?
Paperback
$19.00 SGD
The Wrong/Wrung Side of Love
Paperback
$21.50 SGD
Babel Via Negativa
Paperback
$14.00 SGD
E-book
$14.00 SGD
Equatorial Sunshine
Paperback
$10.00 SGD
The Hidden Papyrus of Hen-taui
Paperback
$19.90 SGD
Straight from the Heart
Paperback
$18.00 SGD
Teaching Poetry To Adolescents: A Teacher's Guide to Little Things
Out of stock
Paperback
$18.60 SGD
Never Before—50 Essential Poems / 不可预期—诗精50首
Out of stock
Paperback
$18.60 SGD
SG Poems 2017-2018
Out of stock
Paperback
$11.21 SGD
Love at the Gallery
Out of stock
Paperback
$18.60 SGD
SG Poems 2015-2016
Out of stock
Paperback
$14.00 SGD
Pilgrimage
Out of stock
Paperback
$9.35 SGD
Unhomed
Out of stock
Paperback
$9.35 SGD
Crossing Universes
Out of stock
Paperback
$18.60 SGD
一首诗的时间 2015
Out of stock
Paperback
$10.00 SGD
Right of the Soil (Chapbook)
Out of stock
Paperback
$13.00 SGD
Finding Francis: A Poetic Adventure
Out of stock
Paperback
$14.95 SGD
Footfalls in the Rain
Out of stock
Paperback
$20.00 SGD
Light is like water
Out of stock
Paperback
$14.00 SGD
A Lover's Soliloquy
Out of stock
Out of print
Paperback
$14.90 SGD
The Evidence of the Senses
Out of stock
Out of print
Attunement
Is life hustling you out of tune? As the week roars by, we invite you to a slice of attunement penned lovingly by our authors, friends, and yours truly. Freshly delivered weekly with care. Intimacy guaranteed. Read selected letters below.
Magical, luminous things
Feb 19, 2022
I have flown across an ocean this week. This still sounds surreal to say.
Read more
No negotiation for blood debt
Feb 14, 2022
The Burmese language resistance poetry is deeply embedded in the country’s colonial past. When mo...
Read more
Burning holes in the darkness
Feb 7, 2022
Poets killed in broad daylight, writers tortured and maimed. I wonder if their ghosts watch on fr...
Read more
