This highly anticipated new collection from a prize-winning Chinese Singaporean writer probes the place of history in our contemporary, border-crossing lives and communities.
Theophilus Kwek&;s first UK collection is concerned with the individual and the collective stories that become history. The poems set out from formative moments in the poet&;s memory, to pivotal moments in the colonial past of Southeast Asia, and finally the political upheavals of the present. Hospitality, precarity, migration &; these are some of the themes that recur as the poet makes his own journey from Singapore to Europe and back again.Moving House moves on a big time and space map, from Icelandic tales to the Malayan Emergency, and more contemporary dramas. From the perspective of a Chinese Singaporean shaped by the collective traditions and histories described in this book, writing in Britain, the poems model a sense of openness on the space of the page.