Chasing Curtained Suns
Math Paper Press — 2012
About
Jerrold Yam’s debut poetry collection charts the precarious tilt from adolescence to adulthood. The poems—which invoke subjects as diverse as childbirth, celebrity culture and National Service— extend beyond a struggle for acceptance amid the transience of modern Singapore and into the universal territory of teenagehood. Growing up suggests an inexorable shift to adult sensibilities, but this transition is fraught with countervailing tensions of moving on, letting go and leaving behind.
Reviews
Youth.SG - “A reader could not ask more of a poet.”
Pi Newspaper - “Pop and go. Prozac on the rocks.”
The Tab London - “An exploration of the awkwardly menacing and rousing experiences of growing up against the backdrop of a modern Singapore.”
Chasing Curtained Suns offers poems that show through deft sleight of the poet’s hand that sliver of light in the mind’s eye with which it carefully considers particular things in its world … And we recognize, as the poet does, that the well-worn ways can sometimes glow; and that silence, sweet twin of language, renews itself through poetry well-wrought.
— Marjorie Evasco, recipient of the S.E.A. Write Award
Jerrold Yam’s poems sparkle, yet underneath all that lustre is a fledgling spirit eager to build bridges out of uncertainty, loneliness and self-doubt, before arriving at a still point of equipoise and wonder.
— Cyril Wong, recipient of the Singapore Literature Prize