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poems by
Daryl Lim Wei Jie
Paperback. 96 pages.
Landmark Books, Singapore.
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SHORTLISTED FOR THE SINGAPORE LITERATURE PRIZE
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ABOUT ANYTHING BUT HUMAN (2021)
BY DARYL LIM WEI JIE
“The land is furrowed deep with worry. The angsana trees are turning orange with pain.” Anything But Human emerges, squeaking and poorly oiled, from this rubbish heap we’ve all piled up. It revels in the transfixing beauty of this last age of man. These poems have dwelt too close to the nuclear waste facility. These poems have traversed through fields of madness for grains for truth. These poems attempt to wring the last dregs out of language. This collection grasps for a poetry beyond our collective exhaustion.
“With its allusions to subsidies and sheltered walkways, capitalism and capital punishment, this dazzling, delightful collection finds a fitting backdrop in a country where love is commodified and economics erotised ... What a mood.”
“At face value, Anything but Human is deceptively easy (and fun) to read, but bubbling below the inventive turn of phrases and often surreal/absurdist scenarios are wisdom-nuggets waiting to be uncovered. The book, with life breathed into inanimate objects and the seemingly mundane, is rife with “the suspicion of meaning” ... The result is an intriguing collection that revels in the beauty of obvious beauty, as much as it does the beauty of the macabre and the unexpected, while reminding us that “being human is an ongoing activity.”
“It reads like a lesson in vision. A portrait of sight.”
“Anything but Human is a boundary-blurring odyssey...”
“For all the simultaneous sharpness and listlessness of his poems, Lim’s Anything But Human features lines of strange, shaking tenderness, all nestled amongst the debris. For visceral human emotions to feature amongst things which are “Anything But Human”, is for them to be heightened and distilled to a singular shade of essentiality and desperation ... Anything But Human is not without surprises – it is at turns most ostensibly human.”
“Lim’s collection of poems is thus a playful and ambitious take on deconstructing reality and composing two parts – simulacra and a reset. This collection insists on more and excess, diffusion of place, circularities of food production/consumption cycles, and how absurd normality has become. In post-truth, in hyper-reality, one wonders to the extent to which the ground one stands on is solid. If everything is contradictory, what is the point of anything at all? Yet, despite all these abnormalities and unsettling reality, Lim’s poems insist that there is a need to move on, to keep on.”
“My favorite read of 2021 has to be Daryl Lim’s just-released Anything but Human. Resisting the Singaporean urge to mass-produce, Daryl has waited five years after his first collection, A Book of Changes, to produce a breathtaking sophomore effort that explores all the shades between and beyond black humor and white space. The first read is a pleasant gambol through nimble images that may elicit many a wry chuckle, but repeat readings are an invitation to lose yourself in a dark forest of shattered language. ”
“Something’s astir in the air. It’s the sound of atoms and molecules reconfiguring ceaselessly in this hologrammatic spin of words. Daryl Lim’s sensual book is a Bacchanalia of banal and familiar objects crystallised into revelations. Savour the odd dreams and piquant insights: Whether it’s Mrs Lee of ‘Parkway’ who is ‘hypotenuse to the railing of ageing steel,’ or someone slithering ‘towards the counter / to the expired tunes of Christmas’ in ‘McDonald’s with the Death Penalty’, there’s a frisson running throughout Lim’s exploratory multi-verse. You won’t know exactly what you’re in for, but you are game.”
— Yeow Kai Chai, author of One to the Dark Tower Comes
“In Daryl Lim’s Anything But Human, we encounter a world that is simultaneously sundered and barely begun, where debts are paid but only in hindsight and on discount, and where the self is to be found, yes, but always fragmented and in places we hardly expect it to be found: in the eye of a suckling pig, in organic jam, in flies.
These are poems of aftermath and prototype. They are parables of how to survive a cataclysm we imagine has yet to come, but has actually already arrived. And in the spirit of all the prophets of old, Daryl Lim, with a wink and smirk, heralds both The end is to come! and We missed our chance!
These poems are deeply funny, even if they are also almost always deeply sad. I suspect Daryl has invented a kind of poem that is emotional, minus the tears and I am moved by these assemblages of song enough that tonight I feel I can finally rest knowing there is a poet who is brave enough to speak out of the comfort of the conventional categories and fling us in all of our tragic and glorious disarray. What a feat!
— Lawrence Lacambra Ypil, author of The Experiment of the Tropics
“After his debut A Book of Changes, Daryl turns his historian’s eye to dissecting our present. Anything But Human takes our tendencies to consume, commoditise and capitalise to their rightful absurdist end. This surreal hellscape is lit up by language at its most pliable and playful. Daryl draws surprising beauty from bureaucratese and revels in defying expectations with wit then bathos. Here you will find a sensory playground for the overworked bourgeoisie, a zen retreat for production factors in a post-capitalist world, a city deconstructed that you will come to see anew.”
— Amanda Chong, author of Professions