Infinity Diary
Cyril Wong
Seagull Books: 2020
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This collection opens with Cyril Wong as flâneur, a latter-day Baudelaire rambling in Singapore, but not in the arcades and hyper-cooled malls of Orchard Road. His territory is the Clementi district, the city’s Housing Development Board, where he’s a postmodernist participant-observer, drawn to and alienated from the ‘tangram heartland corridors of no-time’. His anandamaya kosha—the fifth spirit layer sheathing the embodied self on a good day—is being put to a tough test this Sunday. He sniffs out—’neighbours picking up shit after their dogs; neighbours forgetting to pick up their shit’— the ‘purlieus’ of the MRT railway, NTUC supermarket, the ‘manic tragedy’ of the mall, but he still manages to feel ‘there are arhats among us that we never acknowledge’ with their insight into self and spirit.

So the book begins, but ‘Dear Stupid Straight People’ would be the poem to attract a banner headline in the press: an aggressive affirmation, an in-your-face polemic against homophobia, an enraged audit of its destructive impact in personal and broader social terms. After twenty years of poetry, fiction and translations, Wong has established his central position in queer literature, his oeuvre explicated in many an academic account and reaching an international readership well beyond its Singapore locus. I don’t need to rehearse earlier exegesis, but just to bring out the new book’s scope and texture. This is queer poetry taking a stand. At the same time, it’s a stand that widens out into philosophical and literary preoccupations.

• Tags: Cyril Wong, Issue 21, Michael Freeman, Singapore