Intruder
At home with loneliness and passing encounters, can we be familiar with another or even ourselves? Does love outweigh the uncertainty of its memory? In his third and latest collection, award-winning poet Jerrold Yam ushers us into a traveller's world through sensitive and enquiring eyes, navigating a landscape of flitting figures, thoughts and emotions.
Informed by expansive travel across Asia and Europe, Yam's poetry is as varied as his journey, exploring geysers, horse riding and Picasso, while building on his preoccupations with family, sensuality and displacement. His poems make fresh the contradictions of young adulthood, its heady mix of determined restlessness, bold insecurities, desire for intimacy and fear of commitment. In his unflinchingly honest treatment of these themes, Yam exhibits new range and complexity as he describes a shifting terrain, where moving on is as difficult as letting go.
Above all, Intruder is an attempt to make sense of the impermanent structures that hold up one's life. Home, like love, may be a fiction that we must resist claiming for our own. After all, can we--and should we--be more than intruders?
Intruder
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Reviews
"Jerrold Yam writes with an old voice and the youthful abandon of a poet out of his safe shell; a strong conviction of his depthless solitude yet weak in the presence of love and desire. His poems are lamentable etudes of one-word titles so vocal of absence and longing they are heartrending to those in the thick throes of love's discovery, loss and reconciliation." —Grace Chia, author of Cordelia and womango
"Continuing the grace and eloquence of Yam's earlier collections, Intruder at once strips back and finely embroiders the moments of connection, strangeness and longing between us. Each moment of excavation is touched by the sting of hard-won, lost and lived experiences. Still, there is a grace in Yam's seamless skate; from thought to thought, between people, places, and the changing faces of home. In these poems, Yam braves a deepening that is at once reflective and tense, with a sensual voice that is fast attaining heat." —Jasmine Ann Cooray, Poet
"Jerrold's poems have always been startlingly tender, soulful and enigmatic. But there's an intriguing new wave of experimentation with form in this volume, as he strives to map out his relationship with his father and his years abroad as an undergraduate in the UK." —Ng Yi-Sheng, author of last boy
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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.
Practising Listening
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Our language grows, and with it, new connections to things and creatures around us.
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For years, pouring myself into this collection was an outlet to make peace with my past and also,...
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Touch Some Grass
May 7, 2025
We’ve traded that sense of freefall for control, but maybe in the process, we’ve lost the autonom...
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