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Unhurried, unhurried
❊Reading Southeast Asia @literasea.bookclub
❊Tags: #MangoReadsAsean #MangoReadsSingLit
❊2026: 21/20

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In his debut poetry collection Everything You Carry is Prayer, Qamar Firdaus Saini speaks to many ‘you’s. The reader must identify them: parents, lovers; angels and Gods. All are held like the moon’s reflection cupped in hand, with reverence and stillness, rippling with hellos and goodbyes.

Amidst these ‘you’s, the poetic ‘I’ bends across pitch night, mooring itself to the moon, the morning, the coming of trains, to the herons that warp the shore with flight. Its poems, spanning a decade in the dusting, spill from life the way rain is excess sky, moving constellations glinting in air. This naturalness gives it its soft light.

This ‘I’ is confessional in the way of the 2010s, those who know the poet can testify. The unfamiliar gazer is eventually also able to assemble outlines of its particular person, anchoring loosely to the many ‘you’s as they fade in and out of vision. But the universal tethers stretch long. Taking the collection from afar, topos between specific place (“compassvale mall”) and generic landscape (“meadow”) do not gradate gently. The reader decides for themselves if distances over the page and its corresponding ideoscape can be comfortably covered between any two words.

For me, like mimeographs of older astronomy books, the image in the stars is vague, such that visual structure by other means becomes necessary.

Thank you first to @afterimage.press for the review copy, then to my sister, for ferrying it to me across the waters.

💫 #MangoReadsSingLit #SingLit #EverythingYouCarryIsPrayer #AfterImagePress #SingLitStation by @mango.reads

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22 days ago

That I ran out of patience for this book before it had run its course maybe speaks to my great fortune of having grown up in a relatively unshamed, undisciplined body. Or maybe its plodding dourness isn't suited to the lightness of summer.

But that it is from the Croatian, which does not see translation so often, warrants that I give the author, if not the book, another go. I know very little about the state of queer politics in the country, and the impact of the Croatian War of independence on the collective psyche.

Maybe this is only an unhappy pause—maybe i will return to it with greater compassion and patience, maybe I will not.

—
#CroatianLiterature #QueerLiterature #WomenInTranslation #SonsDaughters #IvanaBodrozic by @mango.reads

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2 months ago

PANICS knifes you unsuspecting—down an arrondissement, as it were any other day—then you’re down on the ground, first casualty of the tussle barbara takes to her unseen ENEMY

molinard’s syle is not a representation of madness, it is simply mad – the literary unhinged woman of our now is by comparison a stylish and benign creature, beset by piquant flights of rage from which the reader can be predictably abandoned softly back into her knowable world

(she’s writing to survive it and that writing must survive her

these stories duras and husband had to wrest away–and even then they were found torn to shreds; not a word was published after the vault)

even if you were not ill to begin with, PANICS seizes and quarters all your aspects into something unrecognisably animal

(my body unwilling, after all these tender years, has been made to remember its original death drive)

some of molinard's panics are descended from grief, others from the mind’s irretrievable theft by disease; some are mild from misrecognitions, too calm for the absurd and extreme violence of the good society which it is subject to

(the kind man thanks the sadist for his severed hand; does his best to abide by the brutal regulations of a society that permits only our most cruel)

so in the end it is really awful humanity holding the knife to this throat, slicing, slowly—so as to drive one to desperately tear with fingernails into microvasculature, precisely and neatly, vein by vein, rather than be choked finally on the wretchedness that is this life by @mango.reads

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2 months ago

Doing my public service as a national subject by contributing to canonizing #SingLit 🇸🇬🫡

I realize that, over the years, I’ve collected the entire cultural medallion series published by @epigrambooks around a decade ago. This was a very good inclusion, although I think its ethical discussion is diminished by formal and plot choices. To refute paternalistic socialization into capitalistic selfishness with a moralizing old man’s salvation doesn’t do enough with the democratic potential of the novel. This and Penghulu is very comfortable with some holding positions over others, they just believe that it is the spiritual destitution of those who occupy them, or the impersonality of exoteric government, that is the problem and not the institutions themselves. And the subtext seems to be that, if you settle your accounts with God at the very end, living while harming others will work itself out 👍 If “do as I say and not as I do” was a book, this would be it. Unfortunately we know that this mode of instruction rarely ever has its desired effects.

With a heavy heart, I do have to put it in my Man Book bin. Otherwise, the dream stories are some of the best Singaporean writing I’ve encountered, and there are a good 50 pages I want to staple to Chee Hong Tat’s forehead.

#MangoReadsSingLit #IsaKamari by @mango.reads

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2 months ago

Yeah so I read this in June, maybe I should have ten years ago idk

I couldn't put anything into sentences but then I remembered this is literally Instagram and I can do whatever I want, so the 'review' is in the slides

Bonnie Huie mentioned needing to find patience and compassion for the young and becoming to push through translating the letters

When the maudlin notebooks sheath into the crocodilian episodes - now, we really get talking

It's a gameshow now; your category is coffin!

Dissatisfactions here and there about capital W Womanhood; not a perfectly formed thought but what does it mean if a woman says she loves you like a man???

#NotesOfACrocodile #QueerLiterature #TaiwaneseLiterature by @mango.reads

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3 months ago

It's only funny because the place is called skwat

The lost and found corner is itself an installation - so deliciously extra

If you lost two bags from the museum of imaginary narrative arts on 21 December 2025, just letting you know, they still have them by @mango.reads

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3 months ago

5.29.26 | Fady Joudah for the @onbeing Poetry Unbound podcast:

“And so I just, with the monstrosity of what was happening, which was of course for a Palestinian, something you knew from a kid because you’re watching your life marked by these kinds of violences after violences that I just couldn’t be bothered with naming. Because obviously naming goes to an extent where, you know, we begin with naming, you know, the Adamic naming and so forth, and it’s good for a while, and then it turns into hell. So I was tired of naming.”

#PalestinianLiterature #FadyJoudah by @mango.reads

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3 months ago

Snagged this from @wormholesg a few months ago. I'm a very slow reader and responder... It takes me half a year or more to ferment and really have something to say. Sometimes I never end up having anything.

But then, I saw a lot of mountains in May. I'm not sure I consciously processed the seeing of said mountains, but I started thinking about the book again while laying in bed this week. These things are probably related

Consciousness-raising literature is always at least a little bit janky to read, but that's my middle-class taste speaking. I like that it's highly accessible, the whole point being that art and politics comes from and belongs to the everyday. The project to do politics by writing, and not just depict politics, is rare in these times. Naming this is also probably a bad idea on my part, but I think it ought to be said. I started crying towards the end of writing because wow! it's so brave and I'm so scared

#MangoReadsSingLit #SingLit #EthosBooks #DianaRahim #WeSawMountains by @mango.reads

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4 months ago

The night before Vesak Day i dreamt of a great flood, a black palm frond smashing into tenth-floor window of my childhood home. This landscape turns dry - an earthquake in a Japanese restaurant - I run out onto the riverbank, the city opposite is burning

I reached for Maung Day’s poetry collection, Death in Summer, like an almanac. The american editors use words like absurdity, dreamlike, liberating the imagination, phantasmagoria, diagnosing an agitated psyche under life under-under the junta.

Many of these poems seem to have been written during the brief intercession of The Lady, actually. Anyways, I never liked the idea of sir poet lucidly piercing the veil from his virile subconscious.

This is moreso a dream diary binding images into coexistence with functional grammar, like a newscaster who can never say because, only and then

Perhaps the only linguistic means we have to carry on

Looked up the poet’s interviews - he refuses to comment on the question of why

The editors seem to think he is the sort of poet that wants you to know what he means

He also wants to know what it means

Why everything is burning, seems to always already have been on fire

City, village, man, woman, animal, tree, soldier, prisoner, boy, self, other

Father; king.

To @sebby.reads i bequeath five dreams, one of which I have had already, four which are yet to come, in exchange for this generous gift of rain

👣
#MangoReadsASEAN #MaungDay #DeathInSummer #Poetry #BurmeseLiterature by @mango.reads

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5 months ago

I'm really thankful for all the friends and family who have contributed to Mo's fundraiser in the last few weeks. I can't imagine the stress he is facing now with multiple concurrent crises in the family, while his phone remains broken, making it hard for him to manage the fundraiser himself.

Please support his fundraiser on chuffed (link in bio!). For Singaporean friends or those in Japan, if you'd like to contribute through paynow or paypay drop a comment or DM 🙏 by @mango.reads

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5 months ago

Oh, hey, it really /did/ look like that—

Light came down and shone on me too by @mango.reads

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5 months ago

Some call it romp, call to arms for the queers, the whores, the maneaters - to whoop and swear and swerve and break

Solanas shot Warhol for having lost it, having lost it

Marybeth the historian wrote about madness and art: Val’s difficult relationship with the feminists: everyone she thought made her a living martyr (first feminist political prisoner ! Huzzah !)

: who left her for dead

In Up Your Ass you’d think Bongi the machinegun-mouth type. Reddit haters call it teenage drivel. But Bongi’s oneliner bullets don’t always hit their targets. Maybe it comes down to how you stage it—in my mind these shots don’t come with a sitcom laugh track, marking out where sympathies ought to land

Marybeth said SCUM Manifesto was Solanas’ arms and legs. Up Your Ass was ears, maybe, listening for a sign of being heard.

Arthur, the dishrag wife, I might’ve thought Solanas would cut up (another Daddy’s Girl) but then she doesn’t. The housewife doubles the crazy and passes it on. Solanas’ wet dream perhaps - someone as game to bite down (In today’s parlance, to match her freak

Some days I just want to lose it(

sick of it sick of it sick of it - try not to be bioessentialist about it challenge

Print: World War something, Anna Haifisch

#UpYourAss #ValerieSolanas by @mango.reads

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6 months ago