The Liminal Review of Books is supported by the City of Melbourne Arts Grants Program, and by Creative Victoria’s Creative Ventures Program.
‘Beyond this basic premise of the state fucking you over, which is almost historically universal, is something more specific to the Singaporean psyche: a critique of Singaporean subject-making through a stimulus-response psychology of pain and pleasure discourse—that is, the state fucks us up the ass because we are taught to ask them nicely.’
Read More‘This type of information collaging from various decontextualised sources has resulted in self-help being a genre that is typically not taken seriously and resented by literary critics.’
Read More‘In the beginning, Nakamoto created the network and the coin. Its earliest adopters could only write Bitcoin’s apotheosis. The rest is revisionist history.’
Read More‘No matter how much some people try to keep us as living artefacts, we’re an ever-present myriad of Peoples who live, love and grieve.’
Read More‘Rootlessly cosmopolitan—as fluent in the language of the office as in the language of the bedroom, in the theorems of science as in the paradoxes of theology—poetry is a perennial migrant in the republic of letters.’
Read More‘A rock can outlive history, so long as history does not break the rock.’
Read More‘Language passes through me, in cloudy shapes I only vaguely recognise as the distance between myself and the rest of the world.’
Read More‘Here there are plastic chairs, plastic tables, phone screens, tv soaps, chicken rice, and the poem’s final word, which tells us what we have always known.’
Read More‘The prose poem begins in present tense—we are inside the trauma.’
Read More‘Perhaps the moment-to-moment labour of crafting verse is not wildly dissimilar to the invisible quotidian acts of looking after those we love.’
Read More‘I fill in the silence with the voices who are familiar to me, the words of those in whom I see myself, signing towards an estranged wilderness that we call home.’
Read More‘What might it mean to acknowledge that this is the substance of the labour performed by many of us, those of us who aspire to do anything but?’
Read More‘Throughout her oeuvre, Kapil’s writing mutates beyond her initial idea; the trace of the act of writing and its metamorphosis is not erased in the final congealment of the book.’
Read More‘The difference between swimming and drowning, then, is to ignore your reflection in the water before you jump in.’
Read More‘The best literature complicates morality. Characters are flawed. The resolution is messy. What is lost cannot be redeemed.’
Read More‘We as minoritised folks more broadly want outsiders to understand: there are a hundred ways to be.’
Read More‘Cho offers a lesson in how to write alongside the void…’
Read More‘I realise that my mind, this same mind, will only ever produce the same insights over and over, with varying degrees of clarity, as if I were new versions of a smartphone each time.’
Read More‘Any faithful reading of Cahier requires attention to more than one thing that requires reiterating; the book is uncontainable.’
Read More‘Acknowledging that the ‘truth’ in nonfiction writing is tricky and inherently interpretable subtly undermines the rigidity of mainstream publishing where such books must fall into specific categories.’
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