Waking Up to the Pattern Left by a Snail Overnight: Poems

"Everything everywhere all at once, yet intimately, pulsatingly at home." - Yeow Kai Chai, winner of the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize

A miraculous gathering of voices from nature, pop culture, and human dictatorship, this "crystalline" collection asks what it means to live in danger, and how to break free.

Winner of the 2022 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize

The archaeological traces of a snail trail are left on a window, evidence of a fevered, sleepless wandering. A charlatan fortune teller utters prophecies from a coffin of a box. Small moments - the cutting of a butternut squash, the discovery of an octopus in the water - become windows into the tragicomedy of human life.

A journey between politics and ecology, Waking Up to the Pattern Left by a Snail Overnight bursts open the shared doors of meditation and madness, of nature and human corruption, throwing the sounds and visions of Taylor Swift, Bjork, Maria Ressa, Mad Max, Japanese anime, and the Marcos dictatorship into an unpredictable dance filled with moments of silence and wonder.

Tinged with darkness but never with despair, these poems walk through remnants of grief, destruction, and corruption and toward versions of rebirth, each one a map showing us the way to heal from loss and answer with joy.