From the gap of two generations, a young Singaporean poet interrogates the victors, vanquished and victims of Singapore’s surrender in 1945. The weighty records of the Japanese Occupation are questioned: air raids, the Battle of Opium Hill, the Alexandra Hospital massacare, Sook Ching, Kempeitai anarchy, comfort women stations.
These, bound up with terrible family accounts, are examined through poetic lenses, sometimes magnified, other times widened, but unremittingly focused.
Praise
“At long last a book of English poetry that dares to sink its teeth into Singapore’s experience of World War Two. [The poems] remind me again of poetry’s ability to unsettle language, to trouble the iconic images and emotions of a moment we think we know through documents, textbooks, novels, TV shows.”
—Hao Tse Guang, Author of The International Left-Hand Calligraphy Association
“Sher Ting’s Burn After Dawn is a dynamic, assured, resounding debut.”
—Gabrielle Bates, Author of Judas Goat
About the Author
Sher Ting is a Singaporean-Chinese writer. She is a 2021 Writeability Fellow with Writers Victoria, 2023 Kenyon Review Winter Workshop participant and Tin House Winter Workshop participant. She is a 2021/22 Pushcart and Best of The Net nominee with work published in Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Pleiades, Salt Hill, Asian American Writers Workshop’s The Margins, The Journal of Ohio State University and elsewhere.
She writes about memory, nostalgia and the places that haunt us in between. Her words can be found at sherting.com.
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