Cyril Wong

Cyril Wong (born June 27, 1977) is the author of ten volumes of poetry and one collection of prose.

Biography
Born in 1977, Cyril Wong attended Saint Patrick's School, Singapore and Temasek Junior College, before completing a doctoral degree in English literature at the National University of Singapore. His poems have appeared in journals around the world, including Atlanta Review, Fulcrum, Poetry International, Cimarron Review, Wascana Review, Dimsum, Asia Literary Review, The Bungeishichoo (Japanese translation), La traductière (French translation) and Die Horen (German translation). They have also been featured in the 2008 W.W. Norton & Co. anthology, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond, and Chinese Erotic Poems by Everyman's Library. Cyril was guest editor for Gangway (#35 - Travel and Transitioning), co-editor of the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, founding editor of poetry webjournal, SOFTBLOW, and a featured poet at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, the Sydney Writers' Festival, and the Singapore Writers' Festival. TIME magazine (Dec 10, 2007) has written that "his work expands beyond simple sexuality...to embrace themes of love, alienation and human relationships of all kinds.".

Cyril's Poetry
Cyril is recognised as Singapore's first truly confessional poet and "has many styles, all of them limber, which combine the anecdotal and the confessional with the intuitive and the empathetic." His poems are known for their "lyrical intensity" and for "training an almost anthropologically curious eye on the laws and customs of his own family: their strange taciturn ways, their gnomic references to disappointment and guilt, and their penchant for self-delusion." In a way that makes him especially distinctive within the Singaporean poetry scene, his work possesses "a heightened awareness of the physical body, and a desire to probe its visceral materiality for emotional truths." Edwin Thumboo has praised Cyril's poems for their "remarkable inwardness" and how, "without exception, they leave us with the feeling of subjects - occasion, non-happening, an especially poignant experience - explored to unusual limits." With regard to his third collection and its play of presence and absence in the context of Singapore's urbanity and cultural memory, John Phillips described Cyril's poetry as offering "an affirmation of emptiness in a time and place where this is barely possible."

Although Cyril has also been popularly known as a gay poet, Singaporean critic Gwee Li Sui has stressed that readers need not perceive the poet's persona in terms of gay exceptionality, "his qualities of spaciousness and morphing images also manifesting an interest in a kind of New-Age irreligious spirituality." This interest is fully expressed in Cyril's book, Satori Blues, in which the author "teases us out of our complacencies and directs/guides our thinking along the long, hard route to self-awareness...Hence 'blues'. Hence the extraordinary attempt to seduce the reader into somnambulance-via-rhythmic, rhymic language, the language of meditative poetry." In a review by the Southeast Asian Review of English, Cyril's poetry has been described as "an art that works simply from a personal plane, and from within such a plane we have some of the most sensitive, articulate probings into the nature of one's self that have never been seen before in all of contemporary Singaporean verse."

Books

 * Straw, Sticks, Brick (Math Paper Press, 2012) ISBN 978-981-07-3385-8
 * Satori Blues (Softblow Press, 2011) ISBN 978-981-08-7361-5
 * oneiros (Firstfruits, 2010) ISBN 978-981-08-4580-3
 * Let Me Tell You Something About That Night (Transit Lounge, 2009 | Ethos Book, 2012) ISBN 978-0-9805717-1-4
 * tilting our plates to catch the light (Firstfruits, 2007 | Math Paper Press, 2012) ISBN 978-981-05-9385-8
 * Excess Baggage and Claim, co-authored with Terry Jaensch (Transit Lounge, 2007) ISBN 978-0-9750228-5-6
 * like a seed with its singular purpose (Firstfruits, 2006) ISBN 981-05-5930-5
 * unmarked treasure (Firstfruits, 2004 | Math Paper Press, 2012) ISBN 978-981-05-0408-3
 * below: absence (Firstfruits, 2002) ISBN 981-04-7592-6
 * the end of his orbit (Firstfruits, 2001) ISBN 981-04-4329-3
 * squatting quietly (Firstfruits, 2000) ISBN 981-04-2826-X

eBook

 * Fires (Book Merah, 2009) ASIN: B002P8MPK8, Kindle Edition

Chapbooks

 * You Cannot Count Smoke (Math Paper Press, 2011) ISBN 978-981-08-9838-0
 * The Boy With The Flower That Grew Out Of His Ass (Math Paper Press, 2007) ISBN 978-981-05-8387-3

Awards and acclaim

 * Let Me Tell You Something About That Night listed by The Straits Times as among the best 5 books of the year (2009)
 * tilting our plates to catch the light listed by The Straits Times as among the best 5 books of the year (2007)
 * Singapore Literature Prize for unmarked treasure (2006)
 * National Arts Council's Young Artist Award (Singapore, 2005)
 * Golden Point Award (Singapore, 2004)