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After the Fire book cover
After the Fire
New and Selected Poems
2023
First Published
3.53
Average Rating
200
Number of Pages
After the Fire begins with poems summoning the dead to the poet’s new life in the adoptive country. They restore memories of the absent father and grandmother, uncovering a narrative continuity between the past and present, old and new countries, and between the dead and the living. While the new poems signal a sense of homecoming, the selections from three previous volumes register the quarrel with home and self, a disaffection that led to journeys in search of an elsewhere, to encounters with remarkable individuals, sacramental meetings that, when recalled, yield what Robert Frost calls "a momentary stay against confusion".
Avg Rating
3.53
Number of Ratings
30
5 STARS
10%
4 STARS
50%
3 STARS
27%
2 STARS
10%
1 STARS
3%
goodreads

Author

Boey Kim Cheng
Boey Kim Cheng
Author · 6 books

Boey Kim Cheng is a multi-award winning Singapore-born poet, and a 1996 recipient of the National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award. He emigrated to Australia in 1997, but returned in 2013 as one of Nanyang Technological University's writers-in-residence; he is currently Associate Professor in the NTU Division of English. He has published five collections of poetry, including Clear Brightness, which was selected by The Straits Times as one of the Best Books of 2012. His writing is frequently studied in tertiary and university institutions in Singapore and abroad. Boey co-founded Mascara Literary Review in 2007, the first Australian literary journal to promote Asian Australian writing, and in 2013 co-edited the groundbreaking anthology Contemporary Asian Australian Poets. In 2017, Epigram Books reissued his celebrated travel memoir Between Stations, and released his first novel, Gull Between Heaven and Earth, on the life of the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu.

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