SWF 2012 / Alfian Sa’at x Cyril Wong – The Twin Launch Public event

BooksActually & Math Paper Press
proudly presents

at Singapore Writers Festival 2012

STRAW, STICKS, BRICK by Cyril Wong
THE INVISIBLE MANUSCRIPT by Alfian Sa’at

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Date: 2 Nov 2012, Friday
Time: 8 pm ~ 9 pm
Venue: Singapore Management University
(ilovebooks.com Pavilion, Campus Green)

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The Invisible Manuscript is Alfian Sa'at's first unpublished collection of writings composed when he was 22. It was first distributed unofficially to selected friends and colleagues. Bearing passionate testimony to private and public memories, this gathering of poems and prose fragments documenting the intimate challenges of homosexual longing gives voice to an invisible minority still struggling to be recognised today. Now published at last, this book, full of fierce confessions, ambivalences and flinty epiphanies, will shock and devastate.

Here is an uncompromising confluence of unfulfilled desires wrought through language by one of Singapore's most outspoken and critical voices.

Cyril Wong’s prose poems remark, instruct, exclaim and curse at a world long settled into its desire-ridden forms. These protracted sentences both attack and reflect on the miasma of memory, working life, the delusions of family life, and the paradoxes of lust and love, moving between meditative moments, philosophical arguments and cryptic to lyrical tongue-lashings. Time, or our failure to exist meaningfully beyond its dimensions, forms the heartbeat of this book.

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Alfian Sa'at is the Resident Playwright of W!LD RICE. His plays have been translated into German and Swedish, and they have been read and performed in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, London, Berlin, Hamburg, Zurich and Stockholm. He has been nominated for the Life! Theatre Swards for Best Original Script six times, and has received the award twice.

Alfian was the winner of the SPH-NAC Golden Point Award for Poetry and the Singapore Young Artist Award for Literature in 2001. His other publications include Collected Plays One, Collected Plays Two, and Cooling Off Day; the poetry collections One Fierce Hour and A History of Amnesia, as well as the short story collection Corridor, and Malay Sketches.

Cyril Wong has been called Singapore’s first confessional poet. Author of nine volumes of poetry and a collection of strange tales, he has received the Singapore Literature Prize and the National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award. Cyril completed his PhD in English Literature at the National University of Singapore and his last poetry collection was Satori Blues (Softblow Press 2011). In 2012, Math Paper Press republished two past volumes, Unmarked Treasure and Tilting Our Plates To Catch The Light. He is the founding editor of SOFTBLOW, an international poetry website.