Waves Rising: Collected Works of Ho Poh Fun & Responses

Waves Rising is a volume that aims to recover the voice of Ho Poh Fun, an accomplished poet and fiction writer in the 1980s and 1990s, while establishing the contemporary relevance of her work to the growing readership of Singapore literature. Ho’s poetry and short fiction engage with questions of land reclamation, ecological loss and the lived experience of localities in way that were ahead of her time.



The book adds to the widening critical reception of Singapore writing by pioneering a hybrid genre that puts a single author writing’s alongside creative and critical responses to Ho as writer and teacher.



Cover Blurb



Singapore in the late seventies is first dreamt, then built: a city that envelopes an entire island. Thousands have begun their lives in highrise housing, skyscrapers ascend to a sky that recedes; an entire shoreline is buried as the East Coast is reclaimed. Nature withdraws: the neighbourhood of Katong forgets the sea as marine mollusks are buried, and sea-turtles depart. A teacher in her thirties becomes a writer, penning fiction and poetry that calls forth trees and flowers by name, and captures the feminine consciousness of an ascendent middle-class. In her work, the character of the New Woman navigates pregnancy and prospects in an increasingly regulated and amnesiac society.



Waves Rising brings together, for the first time, the entirety of Ho Poh Fun’s published writing, including the full text of Katong and Other Poems, and her accomplished fiction that first appeared in Singa. A teacher of many, this volume also signals her arrival as a writer in the form of creative and critical responses from fellow poets, colleagues, students and new readers discovering Ho for the first time.