Anything But Human
“The land is furrowed deep with worry. The angsana trees are turning orange with pain.” This collection emerges, squeaking and poorly oiled, from this rubbish heap we have all piled up. It revels in the transfixing beauty of this last age of man. These poems have dwelt too close to the nuclear waste facility. These poems have traversed through fields of madness for grains of truth. These poems attempt to wring the last dregs out of language. Anything but Human grasps for a poetry beyond our collective exhaustion.
Fly Forgotten, as a Dream (II)
We wake up with fifth-generation antibiotics in our mouths. My skin is scaly with the pieties of the past. Everything we do now is terribly ill-advised. Just yesterday, you brought home a pack of sickly biscuits. They taste deeply of the amnesia we’ve grown to love and cherish. I chance upon an old photograph of people eating around a banquet table. There is a suckling pig with cherries in its eyes. I find another photo of almost the same scene, but the pig has my eyes. The rain beats on my window with great urgency. At night the bed is hot with the suspicion of meaning.
Landmark Books2021
Judges' Comments
At face value, Anything but Human is deceptively easy (and fun) to read, but bubbling below the inventive turn of phrases and often surreal/absurdist scenarios are wisdom-nuggets waiting to be uncovered. The book, with life breathed into inanimate objects and the seemingly mundane, is rife with (as Daryl Lim Wei Jie writes) “the suspicion of meaning”. The banalities of harsh reality are livened up with imagination and magical moments, as witnessed in the first section ‘desert of the real’ (a quote from French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard, as featured in the first Matrix movie), before Lim dwells on his Chinese-ness by tackling the translation of Tang-dynasty poet Bai Juyi’s Chinese poems in the second section ‘great reset’. The result is an intriguing collection that revels in the beauty of obvious beauty, as much as it does the beauty of the macabre and the unexpected, while reminding us that “being human is an ongoing activity”.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daryl Lim Wei Jie
Daryl Lim Wei Jie is a poet, writer and literary critic from Singapore. His first book of poetry is A Book of Changes. He is the co-editor of Food Republic: A Singapore Literary Banquet, the first definitive anthology of literary food writing from Singapore. He was quoted in international media for his tabulation of similar texts in the plagiarism of Sharon Wee's cookbook by Elizabeth Haigh. He has won the Golden Point Award in 2015 for English Poetry.
