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Debut Poetry Collections Explore Love

The Straits Times

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July 27, 2025

Two debut poetry collections by young Singaporean poets deal intimately with love and its complex intersections with identity and the body.

- Shawn Hoo

WHAT GOD TOOK YOUR LEGS AWAY By Wahid Al Mamun Poetry/Afterimage/Paperback/ 96 pages/$20.90

HOMESICK By nor Poetry/Ethos Books/Paperback/ 128 pages/$18

Two debut poetry collections by young Singaporean poets deal intimately with love and its complex intersections with identity and the body. While nor deals with fantasies and self-made rituals in conjuring love, Wahid Al Mamun explores the tentative beginnings of love amid larger social and political observations.

In multidisciplinary artist and poet nor's homesick, the quest for love is not so much a search but an invention.

In the long poem titled wedding, a fantasy wedding sees the speaker perform a Mandi Bunga ceremony—a floral bath ritual—at East Coast during sunrise with a boy. A sequence with a made-up husband is interrupted by instructions on ritual and invention: "How do you get a man like mine? Simple. On the night of a new moon, preferably a Thursday, shave all of your pubes."

In the poem

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