A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore
Poetry • 76 pages • $20.90
Winner of the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize
Launching at Book Bar on 4 Jun, 7pm
Poems by
Samuel Lee
Copies available end May. For now—RSVP to the (re)launch:
Last published in 2016, AFTERIMAGE is proud to restore to circulation Samuel Lee’s A Field Guide to Supermarkets as part of its RENDITIONS series, committed to preserving and reintroducing culturally defining works.
A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore is a 19th century reference book (on philology? art history? anthropology? nobody remembers) that fell into a tropical swamp and was rescued, then lovingly restored, by a nice lady in curlers.
Caked in organic matter too dense to scrub off, the pages of Samuel Lee's debut collection reveal visions and premonitions of a city filled with characters engaged in their own private sorrows, both minute and expansive. To read him is to be lost in the aisles of millennia.
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Trained in art history and literature at the National University of Singapore, Yale University and the University of Chicago, Samuel Lee (b. 1992) is a writer who lives and works in Singapore.
The manuscript of his first poetry collection, A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore (2016), was selected for the inaugural edition of Manuscript Bootcamp, and was subsequently published under the Ten Year Series imprint at Math Paper Press. The collection has since been awarded the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018, making him one of the youngest winners of the award to date.
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Hot Girls Have Stomach Issues
Poetry • 126 pages • $20.90
Published Apr 2026
Poems by
Kimberley Chia Qin
Get your copy of the ST #1 Bestseller today:
“I have been waiting for a voice like this—brazen and bare, insisting on her own arrival… A debut collection that talks back to our foremothers, and makes them all proud.”—Amanda Chong
Why do we love in the way that we do? This debut collection by Kimberley Chia Qin takes up the question through the lens of girls coming into their womanhood, and the messy inheritances that shape them. At once a reckoning and a toast, these poems move through family, grief, illness, and a host of other growing pains—tracing how they bind us, how they break us, and how they bequeath us a license to love.
Hot Girls Have Stomach Issues is a remedy against that age-old problem: not quite being a girl, not yet calling oneself a woman. Its poems reach across time and space to gather at a dining table laden with ginseng, kueh, and cut fruit, offering a feast of loss, stolen intimacies and other tender cuts of the human condition—first as a way to live with themselves, and then, finally, as a way to thrive. They ask us all to sit, and eat.
blood/work
Poetry • 110 pages • $20.90
Published Feb 2026
Poems by
bani haykal, David Wong Hsien Ming & Izyanti Asa’ari
With a critical introduction by
Diana Rahim
Get your copy (alone, or as part of an ALLTHETIME bundle) on our webstore:
Our ALLTHETIME folios present three poets across the generations in conversation with one another. This time, the words of bani haykal, David Wong Hsieng Ming and Izyanti Asa’ari braid together the grievances–quiet and loud–that colour the days of our increasingly estranged lives.
blood/work brings together three poets whose voices intertwine across themes of endurance, immanent pain, and the body’s remembering. Moving between confession and collaboration, the collection traces how blood—as kinship, sacrifice, and persistence—binds us to histories both chosen and imposed.
Each poet writes into the work of living: the physical, the emotional, and the collective labour of becoming. In dialogue, their poems blur boundaries of voice and authorship, building a shared anatomy of care and survival. blood/work asks what is passed through us, what we carry, and how writing might transform what wounds into what endures.
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Poetry • 72 pages
Limited Edition
Published Nov 2025
Poems by Adeline Loh
Loosely modelled after an otome (乙女; lit. trans. “young girl”) game, with special illustrations by JOYRU (Jie Ru Lim), Adeline Loh’s dream girl, loading is part of AFTERIMAGE’s select range of limited-edition concept-driven chapbooks, making them as engrossing to read as they are beautiful to behold.
dream girl, loading bends and takes shape around the dizzying promise of an otome game, where possibilities for a beautiful life unfold along a series of carefully wrought choices and the bets we place on ourselves.
The poems in this chapbook reach through different timelines and realities in search of happily-ever-afters and more fantastical ways of being. Is girlhood a state of endless possibility until a hero comes along? How long can one remain kawaii before smashing headfirst into heartbreak and regret? In the light of so many unfathomable conclusions, these poems chart a blueprint for how there might still be meaning in owning up to and remaining steadfast in the choices we’ve made, even when they’re not ideal—for the decisions we make and the endings we deserve. Are you ready to begin a new game?
📌 Enter discount code IDESERVEIT for orders over $50 to get free local shipping.
Poetry • 84 pages
Limited Edition
Published Dec 2025
Poems by nor
Interspersing lyric poetry, photography and the heart-wrenching lyrics of 90s jiwang, nor’s Ginsberg, sing me a jiwang song! is part of AFTERIMAGE’s select range of limited-edition concept-driven chapbooks, making them as engrossing to read as they are beautiful to behold.
This is slice-of-life. This is never-gonna-love-again, but also kiss-me-hard-before-you-go. This is life-in-technicolour, and nor in all their 4C glory. Ginsberg, sing me a jiwang song! begins with the soaring sentimentality of 90s Malay rock ballads—the sound of karaoke rooms, military camps, and bus interchanges across Singapore and Kuala Lumpur—and asks the restless spirit of the Beat Poets to update itself in this key.
In this mixtape of poems, longing becomes communal, laughter cuts through loss, and survival resounds in chorus. These poems collide Howl with heartbreak anthems and improvise with stadium-sized longing to create a new language for queer kinship, joy and that summertime sadness by your heavenly side.
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Poetry • 126 pages
Published Aug 2025
Poems by Chrystal Ho
A finalist for the 2024 Gaudy Boy Book Prize, Chrystal Ho delivers a debut that is both urgent and intimate. Ho takes the temperature of today’s climate by casting her observant eye across art history, domestic interiors, the documented life of Agnes Joaquim, and the invisible cracks in our everyday environment.
Elsewhere, the Cosmos Cracks is a poetry collection that asks, amidst the climate crisis, how one continues to find wonder in the everyday.
Beginning from the confines of a HDB estate, the poems present a way of walking through Singapore’s landscape, to find moments of reconnection across time. In pieces that reconsider public housing as a garden, revisit the well-worn story of a national flower, and return to familiar rituals and language as inherited wisdom, the collection posits that some of our answers might just be awaiting us in plain sight—so long as we learn how to look.
📢 First 25 orders come with a free bucket hat!
📌 Elsewhere, the Cosmos Cracks by Chrystal Ho is also available as an e-book at Kobo, Google Play and other retailers: Amazon US
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Poetry • 96 pages
Published 5 Jul 2025
Poems by Wahid Al Mamun
These poems strive to leap out of the collection. These poems build a bed, watch a cult film, read the news. They take endless flights between the personal and the political, between the specific contours of Singapore’s landscape and the broader trajectories of global movements and inequity. But they can never find their way home.
it took me eight years but here I am, carving, carving
against my wounds until I hit the bone and start
Written over eight years, Wahid Al Mamun’s debut collection of poems is an intricate exploration of migration, memory and love, built on the intersections of private griefs and communal narratives, uttered in a voice both tender and unflinching. What God Took Your Legs Away deftly interrogates the tensions between the body, the nation and their intertwined histories, and asks what it means to write with—and against—one’s (be)longings. It’ll bring you to your knees and take your breath away.
📌 What God Took Your Legs Away by Wahid Al Mamun is also available as an e-book at Kobo and other retailers: Amazon US
📌 Enter discount code IDESERVEIT for orders over $50 to get free local shipping.
Poetry • 104 pages
Published Apr 2025
Poems by Cheng Him
“I finally can understand poetry. It is written as it should be—in Singlish… to see it in this form is nothing short of brilliant.”—Gurmit Singh
“Cheng Him’s poems draw from a jukebox pastiche of references and memories—Mandopop lyrics, Hokkien folk songs, children’s games, Buddhist sutras, everyday expressions, and a Marx quote comprise the various epigraphs that begin the poems. Together, these fragments of linguistic flotsam assemble into an image of a diasporic Singaporean Chinese cultural milieu, caught in swirling tides of language and culture in a nation constantly wracked by transformation.”—SUSPECT
Cheng Him’s explosive debut poetry collection is a narrative-in-poems exploring the inner psyche of the mythical Singaporean Ah Seng, made prismatic through the lens of Buddhism and mid-2010s clubbing fervour.
From the tumultuous days of his childhood to the wayward hurricane of his youth, Boh Beh Zhao charts the trajectory of someone wandering through life as though it has no beginning or conceivable end, and plots his eventual landing into the barren fields of the latter. Hop onboard Ah Seng’s chaotic journey and ask yourself: what does it mean to live life so fast that all else seems to stand still?
📌 Boh Beh Zhao by Cheng Him is also available as an e-book at Kobo, Google Play and other retailers: Amazon US, Apple US
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ALLTHETIME 01
Poetry • 84 pages
Published Feb 2025
Poems by Rosaly Puthucheary, ArunDitha & Zeha
With a critical introduction by Cyril Wong
“If Singapore poetry is to reflect our actual lives, not just our aspirational narratives, then rib/cage is a luminous benchmark.”—Quarterly Literary Review Singapore
Pounding beneath rib/cage is a visceral struggle for selfhood and belonging. These poems shatter through the suffocating grip of silence and constraint. These are words carved into verse as sharp as bone—voiced into the stillness of night.
Within the pages of our first ALLTHETIME folio lies a collection spanning five decades. This chorus of voices across time confront unyielding questions about alienation and autonomy, reminding us that the fight remains as fierce as ever. Let these lines take root in your breath; we dare you to recite them with your whole damn chest.
📢Collecting the series? Your copy of rib/cage: ALLTHETIME 01 is discounted when you purchase our ALLTHETIME bundle.
📌 rib/cage: ALLTHETIME01 by Rosaly Puthucheary, ArunDitha and Zeha is also available as an e-book at Kobo, Google Play and other retailers: Amazon.UK, Apple Books
📌 Enter discount code IDESERVEIT for orders over $50 to get free local shipping.