Wee’s fourth poetry collection is an imaginative reconstruction of a history of permission and prohibition in the Malayan Peninsula. Through excerpts from a fictive publisher’s diary, Wee traces encounters and negotiations with the censor and the censored, beginning just before the implementation of the laws against ‘undesirable publications’. The central section carries us into the difficulties of making literature in the present, each diary entry a record of single painful incidents, each a study of our acts of reading both the printed word and the world. The devastating final section acknowledges the history of books and bookmaking as a history of foreclosures while staying alert to art’s possibilities.

Excerpt

The first time, the person I worked on the manuscripts with left me with outlines and promises to the authors. His leaving was slow, like a roommate who first takes a sip of your almond milk, the crust of your sandwiches, nothing you would notice, before taking a charging cable, an old dictionary, a chair, before disappearing with everything. The slowness of it feel like a greater betrayal, like a taunt to find him out and stop him.

Now I am about to send the first layouts to the printers. This isn't a child as much as an emissary from my island. I am sending out a declaration of independence. There may be no one else here to count on, but it's my place. I don't own the mountain or the sand, but I'll cut loose the coral stems holding this land-buoy in place if I have to, and set the engines ablaze.