12 or 20 (second series) questions with Allison Thung

Allison Thung is a Singaporean poet and project manager. She is the author of Reacquaint (kith books, 2024) and the forthcoming Things I can only say in poems about/to an unspecified ‘you’ (Hem Press, 2025). Her poetry has been published in ANMLY, Heavy Feather Review, Cease, Cows, The Daily Drunk, and elsewhere, and nominated for Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions. Allison reads poetry for ANMLY. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @poetrybyallison, or at www.allisonthung.com.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Although it’s only been a little over a month since its official release, Reacquaint (kith books, 2024) has been several years in the making, plus I’ve known since I was fourteen that I wanted to someday see my words in print, so it’s definitely felt like a longtime dream fulfilled. More practically, it is tangible assurance that my words have a place in the world; a reminder to keep writing.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I actually started writing prose before I found my way to poetry. Growing up, I mostly read short story collections, young adult novels, and comic books, and so I naturally tended towards fiction when I began writing. It wasn’t until I returned to the written word after a hiatus of eight years, saturated with emotions I couldn’t fully access via prose, that poetry became my genre of choice.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

It really depends. Reacquaint took me maybe 18 months, but that’s because it started as standalone pieces that I later brought together to create a coherent manuscript and narrative. Things I can only say in poems about/to an unspecified 'you', which is forthcoming with Hem Press in 2025, as well as two other chapbook manuscripts I have out on submission, were each completed within a few months; the poems for those were written with the inherent understanding that they were meant to be part of larger manuscripts.

Save for two or three, I don’t think I’ve ever significantly changed any poem between their first and final drafts. Most of the time, my poems appear close to their final form, and editing focuses on flow, grammar, and specific word choices.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Poem: Often from the middle of a sentence I am saying to someone else, which I imagine is kind of annoying for the other person, because then I stop talking to make a note. Sometimes from a longtime rumination suddenly become coherent and distinct from the rest of the noise inside my head. Occasionally from a dream.

Approach: These days I prefer to work on a “book” from the start, though it’s important to me that the individual poems can stand on their own. That said, I do still write standalone pieces that don’t fit into a larger theme if I think them necessary to exist.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I do enjoy readings, but it’s something I reserve for after the work has been officially published. My creative process is mostly an exercise in solitude, save for the very occasional times I share pieces about which I have doubts, or for which I have particular affection, with trusted individuals.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

At its core, my poetry seeks greater meaning in the mundane, and to finally put into coherent sentences the many ruminations and emotions that bounce around inside my head.  I spent much of my life worrying that I had lived too underwhelmingly for me to have something worth writing about, and every poem is a much-needed reminder that it’s less about what you’ve experienced, and more about how you perceive and process said experiences.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I don’t know if “role” is the word I’d use. Maybe concerns? But to answer the question, I think it would vary greatly based on the type of writer you are. A journalist, for example, would have very different concerns from a novelist.

At the personal level, I write to tell stories, make sense of my interior and exterior worlds, and defy mortality in some small way.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Essential and appreciated. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

“Forgive yourself”, specifically said to me. It’s not something I’m good at.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I tend to alternate between phases of unshakeable writer’s block and intense creativity, and my writing practices—I wouldn’t use the term routine—differ accordingly. In the former phase, I focus on taking detailed notes whenever ideas or lines come to me; in the latter, I try to draft something daily, even if it’s just a few words.

Generally, when I can write, I prefer silence, solitude, and to be at my desk on my own laptop.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Talking to other people, exercising, and getting out of the house can be helpful with idea generation, but I’ve come to accept that there isn’t very much I can do to affect the larger cycle that I mentioned in my response to the previous question.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Homemade lotus root or watercress soup, bubbling away in the slow cooker until its aroma permeates every inch of the house.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Neither nature nor music feature heavily in the work itself, nor do I tend to create in their midst—I’m very much a poet who prefers to write indoors at my desk, in absolute silence—but both are primary sources of inspiration.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I consider the work of Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Richard Siken, and Chen Chen to be utterly essential. And then outside of the literary world, I have a lot of love and respect for Hozier’s lyricism and how he’s able to embody an entire world in just a few lines of lyrics.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I’d love to travel through Europe for a year or so, and then settle down in Ireland for a couple. Less ambitiously, I’d like to meet and hang out with a capybara or a wallaby.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Realistically, I’d probably still be a project manager, which is my current day job. Unrealistically, I’d be an architect, lawyer, or singer-songwriter.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

It’s just what came most naturally to me whenever I needed to express myself or make sense of the world, and brought me the most satisfaction/fulfilment. Throughout my life, I’ve tried and enjoyed various forms of creativity, including art, craft, and music, but none of those have felt entirely “right” the way writing does.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Book: Kerry Trautman’s Irregulars.

Film: I’m less a film and more a series person, so let’s go with Grace and Frankie.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m currently working on a hybrid chapbook manuscript, and I’ve also got two more completed poetry chapbook manuscripts out on submission.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Beir Bua Press: Lydia Unsworth, Vik Shirley, Tom Jenks + Anthony Etherin,

When Tipperary, Ireland publisher Beir Bua Press (2020-2023) announced, seemingly without prior warning, whether to the public or to their authors, that they were suspending publication and pulling books from availability back in June, I knew I had to get my hands on a few more titles before they disappeared completely. Thanks to individual authors, I’d managed to see two titles prior to this two-week warning: Texas-based Irish-Australian poet Nathanael O’Reilly’s pandemic-era BOULEVARD (2021) [see my review of such here] and Hamilton writer Gary Barwin and St. Catharine’s, Ontario writer Gregory Betts’ collaborative The Fabulous Op (2022) [see my review of such here]. Given how quickly the press vanished, it did cause a certain amount of chaos, especially from authors of relatively-recent titles, but more than a few have since been picked up for reissue by other presses: the Barwin/Betts collaboration and both Beir Bua O’Reilly titles were picked up by Australia’s Downingfield Press, for example, with other Beir Bua titles picked up by Salmon Poetry, kith books, Sunday Mornings at the River and IceFloe Press. The loss of the press is frustrating, but they accomplished an enormous amount across a relatively short period of time.

Run by Irish poet and editor Michelle Moloney King, Beir Bua Press seemingly appeared out of nowhere, quickly establishing itself as a press willing to take risks on experimental work across a wide spectrum of style and geography. King clearly has a fine editorial eye, and the print-on-demand Beir Bua poetry titles were well-designed, looked sharp and included some fantastic writing. To be clear: by shuttering the press so abruptly and allowing her authors no recourse (or prior warning), she did her authors an enormous disservice, and they deserved far better. Either way, given the press disappeared so suddenly, I wanted to at least acknowledge a couple of these titles I ordered back in June, prompted by that infamous “last call for orders.”

Lydia Unsworth, Some Murmur (2021): I’ve been an admirer of Unsworth’s work for a while (a third above/ground press chapbook is forthcoming next month, I’ll have you know), and this is a collection framed as one reacting to a sequence of changes in quick succession: moving to Amsterdam from England ten days before the Brexit referendum, and discovering that she was pregnant. As she writes in her prologue: “When I found out I was pregnant, not long after the Brexit referendum, it felt like a part of me had died and like a second part of me was steadily dying. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, because a lot of people feel a lot of things about procreation—about wanting babies, not wanting babies, really wanting babies, having babies, not having babies, really not having babies, how you should have babies, how you should not have babies—but the way I saw it, from that side of the expansion, was that some unknown and unknowable event was lurching towards me, and its manifestations were showing up all over my body; rising out, bearing down.” Unsworth appears to be a poet that engages with projects, whether book-length or chapbook-length, and this collection works to engage with this sequence of new, foreign spaces, reacting to the notion of permanence, and fluidity across what had previously been fixed. Have you read her take on the prose poem, over at periodicities? She writes of escape, changing forms and sustainability, offering a prose lyric that manages to articulate these shifting sands even as they move. “Thought it was wise to stand before the mirror crack,” she writes, as part of the poem “Attempts to Recover My Previous Form,” “wide like bags of old receipts in supermarket bins. I didn’t compare myself to anyone but how can you not look at all those upended trunks trying to hold their bad weather in?”

Stoop

The body bends towards you like a plant. You are
my sunshine, my ray of sunshine. What do you call
a plant warped by circumstance? I hold you up to the
light. Ten lifts then ten to the side. Environmental
stress weakens the plant. You are heavy fruit. My
stem turns to you, hulking sunflower head bows
down, seeds fall from my eyes. Wind-blown tree –
frozen in flight. Umbrella inside-out, novelty tie
coat-hangered into a U-turn, leg kicked out high.
Flamboyant ice. Waiting for a coin in a hat to say
it’s time.

Vik Shirley, Grotesquerie for the Apocalypse (2021): As Shirley writes in her introduction, the origins of this short collection emerged “out of an intensely creative period in the first year of my PhD, which explores Dark Humour and the Surreal in Poetry. Focussing on the grotesque, I was immersed in, and obsessed with, the work of the Russian-Absurdist, Daniil Kharms, and the strange and surreal fable-like poems of Russell Edson.” This is a relatively short collection (why are these books unpaginated?) very much shaped through the prose poem and prose sentence, and one can see echoes of Edson’s work throughout, with similar echoes that emerge through Chicago poet Benjamin Niespodziany. As the poem “Husband Ghost” opens: “A hospital rang to tell a woman that her husband was dead. // Not only was he dead, but his body had decomposed already and he / had progressed straight through to the ‘ghost phase,’ they said. // They told her she should come and collect him.” There are some interesting echoes, as well, that connect certain of these poems, whether the cluster of “Hello Kitty” poems, or poems that open with a similar descriptive structure. I would very much like to see further pieces by Vik Shirley, and her statement on the prose poem over at periodicities is worth reading, in case you haven’t already seen (and she does mention that this collection will appear as part of a larger work to appear in 2025, which has yet to announce). In a certain way, Shirley appears to approach her lyric from the foundation of the sentence, opening the collection with poems that lean further into line breaks, but soon moving into poems built out of prose poem blocks, each of which offer short, sketched scenes that twist and turn and further twist. The poem “Devil Baby” is a striking example of such, and reads, in full:

A baby started speaking in tongues.

“We don’t want a devil baby,” its parents said.

So they put it in a dinghy, covered it with foil and set it sail down the Nile.

They were on holiday in Egypt, you see.

It was the worst holiday they’d ever had.

Tom Jenks, rhubarb (2021): Providing echoes of the work of Vik Shirley, Tom Jenks’ rhubarb also seems a collection of poems that focus on the sentence, some of which offer line breaks, with others set in a more prose poem structure. One might say that his poems offer first person narratives that seek out their structures. “The horse was revealed to be entirely two-dimensional.” the two-sentence poem “opportunities” begins. “This presented challenges, but also opportunities.” The prose sentences of Tom Jenks offer first person nararatives, moving back and forth from short, sketched bursts, expansive open form poems to clustered prose blocks. There’s such a wry delight in sound and syntax across these poems that are intriguing, and the collection exists as a kind of collage on form, moving from the expansive open lyric to densely-packed short burst. I’d only seen Jenks’ visual works prior to this, so am now quite fascinated by what he is exploring through his sentences: a kind of surreal swirling of narrative twists and turns, one that is open to the experiment-as-it-occurs. I am very interested in seeing where else his poems might find themselves.

 

scissors

Syrop on soya, the square holes in waffles,
cheesy dumplings, ancient grain rolls,
I don’t know what to make of any of it.
All the elements for a good life are in place,
yet a good life is not being lived.
We should rethink the solar system
or buy each other shoulder bags.
I saw a dog that was entirely see through.
I’ve got a ride on mower
but I still use scissors.

Anthony Etherin, Fabric (2022): Another author published previously through above/ground press, “experimental formalist poet” Anthony Etherin, a poet, editor and publisher who lives “on the border of England and Wales,” offers a cluster of poems in Fabric that continue his strict adherence to formal poetic structure, engaging with such as the acrostic, anagram, lipogram, palindrome, villanelle, sonnet and ambigrams, even to the point of brevity, as some were composed with the Twitter/X limit of 280 characters/140 characters in mind. “Fit one sent rule:,” the final couplet of “Sonnet Fuel” reads, “Tier sonnet fuel.” Part of what is always interesting in Etherin’s ongoing work is in seeing just how far it is possible for him to continue across such highly-specific formal paths, and the wonderful variations that emerge through his collections. The overt brevity is interesting as well, offering new layers to his ongoing structures. In his introduction, he offers that “The poems of Fabric [a book he posted online as a free pdf, by the way] are at ease with their poemhood. Some discuss poetry itself, while others are more introspective, eager to evaluate the principles and rules by which they were constructed.” They are at ease with their poemhood, highly aware of their structures, as the collision of sound and meaning provide the delight of what formal possibilities might bring.

 

 

 

Tautograms

The tautogram ties
terms to their typography –
tightening this text.