When the Barbarians Arrive comprises poems from three published collections—Testing the Silence (1997), City of Rain (2003) and What Gives Us Our Names (2011)—together with a body of new and uncollected poems by one of Singapore's most exciting and visible poets of the post-1965 generation. Ranging from unsentimental love poems to sharply satirical writing and audacious medleys, here are poems wry and shrewd, intelligent and sensitive, generous and playful, yet full of paradox; poems that pry, celebrate and unsettle. This is Alvin Pang's first full-length UK publication.