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
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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
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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.
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