‘The empty pursuit of individual gratification gives way to the honour of higher duties. For Deronda, the higher duty, the honourable inheritance, is Zionism.’
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‘At worst, Schapelle was a shady femme fatale layabout who dared risk it all for a quick buck in a country where drug offences are punishable by death. At best, she and her family of Bali-loving watersports enthusiasts with a propensity for getting into verbal and sometimes physical altercations with the media were guilty of eliciting deep cultural cringe.‘
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‘Art will not liberate Palestine. Hammad knows this. To write a book that frames theatre as a radical form of resistance would be naïve.’
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‘In other words, for British colonial law to work, the law needed a poet.’
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‘Even though I no longer think about my racial identity through negation, the central question stayed with me: What does my skin remember, reimagine, reappropriate?’
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‘Beyond this basic premise of the state fucking you over, which is almost historically universal, is something more specific to the Singaporean psyche: a critique of Singaporean subject-making through a stimulus-response psychology of pain and pleasure discourse—that is, the state fucks us up the ass because we are taught to ask them nicely.’
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‘This type of information collaging from various decontextualised sources has resulted in self-help being a genre that is typically not taken seriously and resented by literary critics.’
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‘In the beginning, Nakamoto created the network and the coin. Its earliest adopters could only write Bitcoin’s apotheosis. The rest is revisionist history.’
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‘No matter how much some people try to keep us as living artefacts, we’re an ever-present myriad of Peoples who live, love and grieve.’
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‘Rootlessly cosmopolitan—as fluent in the language of the office as in the language of the bedroom, in the theorems of science as in the paradoxes of theology—poetry is a perennial migrant in the republic of letters.’
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‘A rock can outlive history, so long as history does not break the rock.’
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‘Language passes through me, in cloudy shapes I only vaguely recognise as the distance between myself and the rest of the world.’
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‘Here there are plastic chairs, plastic tables, phone screens, tv soaps, chicken rice, and the poem’s final word, which tells us what we have always known.’
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‘The prose poem begins in present tense—we are inside the trauma.’
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‘Perhaps the moment-to-moment labour of crafting verse is not wildly dissimilar to the invisible quotidian acts of looking after those we love.’
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‘I fill in the silence with the voices who are familiar to me, the words of those in whom I see myself, signing towards an estranged wilderness that we call home.’
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‘What might it mean to acknowledge that this is the substance of the labour performed by many of us, those of us who aspire to do anything but?’
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‘Throughout her oeuvre, Kapil’s writing mutates beyond her initial idea; the trace of the act of writing and its metamorphosis is not erased in the final congealment of the book.’
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‘The difference between swimming and drowning, then, is to ignore your reflection in the water before you jump in.’
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‘The best literature complicates morality. Characters are flawed. The resolution is messy. What is lost cannot be redeemed.’
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