dream girl, loading
Poetry • 72 pages • $26.50
Limited Edition
Launching Thu, 4 Dec, 7pm at Book Bar (57 Duxton Rd, Singapore 089521)
Poems by
Adeline Loh
Get your copy today:
Loosely modelled after an otome (乙女; lit. trans. “young girl”) game, with special illustrations by JOYRU (Jie Ru Lim), Adeline Loh’s dream girl, loading is part of AFTERIMAGE’s select range of limited-edition concept-driven chapbooks, making them as engrossing to read as they are beautiful to behold.
dream girl, loading bends and takes shape around the dizzying promise of an otome game, where possibilities for a beautiful life unfold along a series of carefully wrought choices and the bets we place on ourselves.
The poems in this chapbook reach through different timelines and realities in search of happily-ever-afters and more fantastical ways of being. Is girlhood a state of endless possibility until a hero comes along? How long can one remain kawaii before smashing headfirst into heartbreak and regret? In the light of so many unfathomable conclusions, these poems chart a blueprint for how there might still be meaning in owning up to and remaining steadfast in the choices we’ve made, even when they’re not ideal—for the decisions we make and the endings we deserve. Are you ready to begin a new game?
Ginsberg, sing me a jiwang song!
Poetry • 84 pages • $26.50
Limited Edition
Launching Sun, 7 Dec, 11.30am, Monk’s Brew Club (Level 2) at AFTERPARTY 2025: Chaos! Community!
Poems by
nor
Get your copy today:
Interspersing lyric poetry, photography and the heart-wrenching lyrics of 90s jiwang, nor’s Ginsberg, sing me a jiwang song! is part of AFTERIMAGE’s select range of limited-edition concept-driven chapbooks, making them as engrossing to read as they are beautiful to behold.
This is slice-of-life. This is never-gonna-love-again, but also kiss-me-hard-before-you-go. This is life-in-technicolour, and nor in all their 4C glory. Ginsberg, sing me a jiwang song! begins with the soaring sentimentality of 90s Malay rock ballads—the sound of karaoke rooms, military camps, and bus interchanges across Singapore and Kuala Lumpur—and asks the restless spirit of the Beat Poets to update itself in this key.
In this mixtape of poems, longing becomes communal, laughter cuts through loss, and survival resounds in chorus. These poems collide Howl with heartbreak anthems and improvise with stadium-sized longing to create a new language for queer kinship, joy and that summertime sadness by your heavenly side.
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(1998–2025) is a writer from Singapore.
She has a BA (Hons) in Literature from Yale-NUS College and a MA (Research) in English Literature from Nanyang Technological University. Her poems have been published in journals such as sinθ and The Madrigal, and were nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best New Poets anthology.
dream girl, loading is the author’s posthumous debut in print.
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(b. 1993) is a multidisciplinary artist whose works situates identity and community within speculative timelines through frameworks of gender performance, ethnographic portraits and transnational histories.
nor is the author of homesick (Ethos Books, 2025). Their writings have been in places such as Singa-Pura-Pura: Malay Speculative Fiction from Singapore (2021); Making Kin: Ecofeminist Essays from Singapore (2021); and Brown is Redacted: Reflecting on Race in Singapore (2022).
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Elsewhere, the Cosmos Cracks
Poetry • 126 pages • $20.90
Published 30 Aug 2025
Poems by
Chrystal Ho
Read the Gaudy Boy Prize finalist today:
“Elsewhere, the Cosmos Cracks is a gift of a collection, like an entrancing field guide for what it means to belong to earth and story. These poems shimmer and braid the wild and intimate.”—Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Elsewhere, the Cosmos Cracks is a poetry collection that asks, amidst the climate crisis, how one continues to find wonder in the everyday.
Beginning from the confines of a HDB estate, the poems present a way of walking through Singapore’s landscape, to find moments of reconnection across time. In pieces that reconsider public housing as a garden, revisit the well-worn story of a national flower, and return to familiar rituals and language as inherited wisdom, the collection posits that some of our answers might just be awaiting us in plain sight—so long as we learn how to look.
What God Took Your Legs Away
Poetry • 96 pages • $20.90
Published 5 Jul 2025
Poems by
Wahid Al Mamun
Read the multi-week ST Bestseller today:
These poems strive to leap out of the collection. These poems build a bed, watch a cult film, read the news. They take endless flights between the personal and the political, between the specific contours of Singapore’s landscape and the broader trajectories of global movements and inequity. But they can never find their way home.
it took me eight years but here I am, carving, carving / against my wounds until I hit the bone and start
Written over eight years, Wahid Al Mamun’s debut collection of poems is an intricate exploration of migration, memory and love, built on the intersections of private griefs and communal narratives, uttered in a voice both tender and unflinching. What God Took Your Legs Away deftly interrogates the tensions between the body, the nation and their intertwined histories, and asks what it means to write with—and against—one’s (be)longings. It’ll bring you to your knees and take your breath away.
Boh Beh Zhao
Poetry • 104 pages • $20.90
Published 24 Apr 2025
Poems by
Cheng Him
Read the ST #1 Bestseller today:
“I finally can understand poetry. It is written as it should be—in Singlish… to see it in this form is nothing short of brilliant.”—Gurmit Singh
Cheng Him’s explosive debut poetry collection is a narrative-in-poems exploring the inner psyche of the mythical Singaporean Ah Seng, made prismatic through the lens of Buddhism and mid-2010s clubbing fervour.
From the tumultuous days of his childhood to the wayward hurricane of his youth, Boh Beh Zhao charts the trajectory of someone wandering through life as though it has no beginning or conceivable end, and plots his eventual landing into the barren fields of the latter. Hop onboard Ah Seng’s chaotic journey and ask yourself: what does it mean to live life so fast that all else seems to stand still?
ALLTHETIME 01
Poetry • 84 pages • $20.90
Published 27 Feb 2025
Poems by
Rosaly Puthucheary,
ArunDtiha & Zeha
With a critical introduction by
Cyril Wong
“If Singapore poetry is to reflect our actual lives, not just our aspirational narratives, then rib/cage is a luminous benchmark.”—Quarterly Literary Review Singapore