This is about the city we love and hate; it is the city we dream about, the city we build with paper and words.

Drawing inspiration from PHUNK with Keiichi Tanaami’s Eccentric City, displayed as part of the exhibition, Superfluous Things: Paper, a diverse group of poets will be sharing their works loosely related to the notions of city, art and other eccentricities.

About the poets

Boey Kim Cheng
Since emigrating to Australia from Singapore in 1997, Boey Kim Cheng has made a home in Berowra, New South Wales. His poems have featured in the literature syllabus of the GCE A-level, the HSC and the International Baccalaureate. Besides poetry, he has published a travel memoir, Between Stations, and Gull Between Heaven and Earth, a historical novel about the Tang poet Du Fu.

Mary Jean Chan
Mary Jean Chan is the author of Flèche (Faber & Faber, 2019; Faber USA, 2020), which won the 2019 Costa Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted in 2020 for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, the Jhalak Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize. In 2021, Flèche was chosen as a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Chan’s second poetry collection, Bright Fear, is forthcoming from Faber. Chan is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University and serves as a supervisor on the Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford.
Mary Jean Chan is a Visiting Writer at the Asia Creative Writing Programme, a collaboration between the National Arts Council and the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University.

Jo Morris Dixon
Jo Morris Dixon is from Birmingham and currently lives in Oxford. Her poetry has been published in Oxford Poetry, The Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Ambit and The Signal House Edition. She was longlisted for the 2019 and 2020 National Poetry Competition. I told you everything is her debut poetry pamphlet, out with Verve Poetry Press (October 2021).

Lawrence Lacambra Ypil
Lawrence Lacambra Ypil is an award-winning poet and essayist whose work explores the intersection of text and image, and the role of material culture in the construction of cultural identity. In 2020, he was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards and on the longlist for The Believer Book Awards for The Experiment of the Tropics, the winner of the inaugural Gaudy Boy Book Prize. Ypil has received MFAs from Washington University in St. Louis and from the Nonfiction Writing Program of the University of Iowa. He teaches creative writing at Yale-NUS College.

Moderator: Yoong Shu Hoong
Yong Shu Hoong has authored seven poetry collections, including Frottage (2005) and The Viewing Party (2013), which both won the Singapore Literature Prize, and Anatomy of a Wave (2022). He is one of the four co-authors of The Adopted: Stories from Angkor (2015) and Lost Bodies: Poems Between Portugal and Home (2016).

Photo credit for Mary Jean Chan: Adrian Pope