The Viewing Party

by Yong Shu Hoong

Singapore Literature Prize winner Yong Shu Hoong’s latest book features more than just poetry. There is also a ghostly tale at its core, complete with prose poems and micro fiction of exactly 100 words each, as well as annotated excerpts from an abandoned work.

In this viewing party, readers are invited to take a peek into the domain of death and cinema. You are part of a mob of dispassionate onlookers. Sometimes, you get to play the voyeuristic judge.

Genres: Poetry

134 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Yong Shu Hoong has published four books of poetry: Isaac (1997),do-while(2002), Frottage (2005), which won the 2006 Singapore Literature Prize, and From within the Marrow (2010).

His poems have been included in literary journals like Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Asia Literary Review (Hong Kong), as well as anthologies likeLanguage for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (W.W. Norton, 2008). His short story, ‘The Handover’, was featured in the National Library Board’s reading initiative, Read! Singapore, in 2012.

He has been invited to read at literary festivals and events in Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Australia, England, Ireland, Denmark, Sweden and the United States. From August 2013 to February 2014, he is a writer-in-residence at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

As a freelance journalist, he has written articles for publications likeThe Straits Times (Singapore), South China Morning Post (Hong Kong) and Esquire Singapore. From 2008 to 2013, he reviewed films for the English section of the bilingual freesheet, My Paper (Singapore).

Reviews

[Audrey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Either I could not understand and/or appreciate how the entire book is strung together, but it felt like a careless scrapbook of the author's works (pardon me if the truth is otherwise). When I got to somewhere in the middle I thought I had finally gotten the book's overall theme - death and loss - but towards the end I really wasn't sure at all. There were some parts that I enjoyed, that is true, particularly the only portion of the book with prose, as well as The Viewing Party Part I. A confusing read. Oh well.

[Rage · Rating 2 out of 5]

Inane at best, self indulgent at worst. Mostly at worst.

[Ronnie Tan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not that hard to read
When more rhymes with Toblerone
The viewing party

[CJ]

I wished I enjoyed this, but it felt actively taken by the author’s fascination and self-reflective obsession with his own gaze, so much so that it felt like it wrote over the scenes he looked at; scenes of grieving and death that felt…wrongly consumed by poetic voyeurism.

That is the sort of theme of the collection, but it made me uneasy; nowhere else more than the ghostly interlude in the middle of the collection that fantasises about the ghost of a murdered girl whose death mirrors an unsolved murder in the 80s—but really is just a pale, borderline exploitative recreation of it.

There is poetic honesty, there is the artistic license to explore and express the unsaid, but this felt like an exercise in reducing meaning instead of producing it.

[R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Having different reasons for mourning is not uncommon. But it is harder to speak of grief when one’s unsure of what is lost. There are the film reviewer’s squiggles inscribed in the dark. But what’s of greater interest is a draft of a poem (I assume) etched on pages 1 and 2. Now I’ll never know. Is it the greatest work I’m capable of, or something random not worth a second glance? All the same, I mourn over my notebook’s panic attacks after being left in prolonged darkness, and its mysterious abduction; my absent-mindedness; the never-knowing; my haunting by uncertain deficit” (44).