By Shelly Bryant

rib/cage: ALLTHETIME01
Rosaly Puthucheary, ArunDitha, and Zeha
AFTERIMAGE (2025) / 84 pages / SGD 20.90

  What does it mean to be a body in Singapore today? A daughter? A mother? A monster? A migrant? A maker of myth?

rib/cage, the inaugural publication from AFTERIMAGE, the new poetry imprint of Sing Lit Station, cracks open these questions with a kind of fierce tenderness. A tripartite collection by Rosaly Puthucheary, ArunDitha and Zeha, it is nothing if not audacious – not just for the poetry it contains, but for the editorial decision that shapes its architecture.

This is a dialogic collection in the truest sense of the word. Rather than arranging the poets into discrete silos, each with their own section, the collection is, as Cyril Wong notes in his incisive introduction, "braided together and then divided into three distinct sections". The result is a poetic polyphony where voices are not compartmentalised but placed in conversation. The first section dwells in interpersonal relationships and the search for belonging; the second, in the betrayals and burdens of the body; and the third, in mortality and the tentative work of imagining futures. But even more than these themes, what unites the collection is its deliberate refusal to isolate, categorise or simplify. It speaks of us as interpretive communities (to borrow Steven Mailloux's term) and as participants in what Mikhail Bakhtin might call the dialogic imagination.

That dialogism feels especially important in the current climate. In a literary landscape where multilingualism is often constrained by genre or audience expectation, rib/cage offers an embodied rejection of such limitations. Zeha's work, in particular, boldly interweaves Malay and English: "jasad bertulangkan gelisah, / press down tulang rusuk, expand paru-paru. / hati lain dari jantung tau."

Here, language becomes a kind of anatomical rhythm – an assertion of lived hybridity, not just linguistic code-switching. This intermingling of languages is not ornamental. It is structural. It tells us something vital about who we are and how we live – multi-voiced, multilingual, haunted, surviving. If Singapore poetry is to reflect our actual lives, not just our aspirational narratives, then rib/cage is a luminous benchmark.

Much has already been written about Rosaly Puthucheary's decades-long career, but her work here feels newly vulnerable, almost startling in its introspection. In 'The Python', she writes: "What python has coiled / around me / holding me helpless? / I have been bruised / too many times; / now the tendon cuts sharp."

And 'Divorce': "Our divorce / is a party that is over. / We drank wine / ate cheese. / At the introduction / we thought we had met before. / At the farewell / we know / we are strangers."

There's a kind of spare lyricism here, pared down to the bone, in contrast to the baroque density of Zeha's layered visual poetics or the mystical, incantatory textures of ArunDitha's voice. It would be easy for one of these poetic registers to dominate, but they don't. Instead, each presence reveals something the others cannot say alone. Together, they fracture and refract, until meaning emerges in the gaps.

ArunDitha's work is especially attuned to those gaps – between past and future, mother and daughter, god and silence. In 'The Storm', she writes: "She was standing in a puddle of water / waiting for an electrical storm to come."

And later: "I will never be with anybody who leaves me standing in a puddle of water, / lit with the reflections of a coming electrical storm."

The poem is not just a personal account of domestic trauma. It's a spell, a warning, a reclamation of the right to define love on one's own terms. Throughout the collection, ArunDitha's metaphors often reach for the cosmic, but they are grounded in the ache of the everyday: "an interplanetary organism making peace with the void," she writes in 'Unidentifiable Object'.

It's worth noting that while the editors of this collection – Pooja Nansi and Daryl Qilin Yam – remain silent within its pages, their vision is palpable. I did find myself wishing for a note from them: I remain deeply curious about the editorial process behind this radical structure. That said, the choice to have Cyril Wong write the introduction was a stroke of brilliance. His voice is not only authoritative but also tenderly responsive to each poet's work, and his framing of the collection's "unexpected harmonies" provides readers with a compass through the text's deliberate dissonances.

Ultimately, rib/cage is not a neat book. It does not resolve. But it pulses. It aches. It breathes. It draws us into its bruised, beating core and says: this is how we live. And this is how we might begin to heal.

That, surely, is poetry at its best.

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