By Jonathan Chan

What God Took Your Legs Away
Wahid Al Mamun
AFTERIMAGE (2025) / 96 pages / SGD 20.90

A literary anxiety pervades Wahid Al Mamun's What God Took Your Legs Away. It hearkens back to an older anxiety, one seemingly of a past zeitgeist – the anxiety of becoming a poet. This is reflected in Wahid's acknowledgements – in a dedication to Joshua Ip, he repeats a piece of advice received from Ip during a walk in Melbourne: "You can always wait for the perfect collection, but one day you'll wake up and be 28 years old and will have no collection because you were waiting for perfection. I'm 28 now. Hypothetical, averted. Perfection, also averted." Yet, this unease can seem absent from some more recent English poetry collections published in Singapore, which appear fully formed conceptually and aesthetically. Ng Yi-Sheng has described these in his reflections on Wahid's collection as "experimental forays" or "thesis projects", in contrast to Wahid's reading "like a throwback to a time when your first collection could be about a whole multitude of things you wrote & felt as you found your way towards publication."

What this suggests is a sense of poetry as a process of becoming, apart from the sense of completion that might accompany a fully realised conceptual work. It provides a sense of writing poetry as iterative and ongoing, entwined with a sense of one's own developing aesthetic approach and sensibility. For a poet like Wahid, who matured in the Singapore Poetry Writing Month community, had had his poems published widely across literary journals, and had been featured in writers' festivals in Singapore and Melbourne before the release of his debut collection, one can detect the roots of an unfolding anxiety surrounding publication. Certain forms of literary validation meet the fear of never having the 'credibility' or 'legitimacy', which I parse cautiously, of having a collection of poems published. This reveals a certain vulnerability, or sense of insecurity, to the reader, one that is hyper-conscious of the aesthetic devotion that the impulse to poetry requires, and the personal stakes of a dream unrealised.

Herein, I see Wahid in the company of other writers of Singapore possessing a similar devotedness, writers such as Boey Kim Cheng, or Jee Leong Koh, for whom the vocation of poetry demanded a certain doggedness, a single-mindedness, that eventually took them far from Singapore to places they felt were more conducive to and affirming of their work. I see the same restlessness and yearning present as that of Franz Xaver Kappus, who famously wrote letters to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, the yearning to know if one's poems are any good, and the solitude that shapes the process of becoming a poet. Wahid, now a doctoral student in anthropology at McGill University in Montreal, and previously an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, seems also to have found a kind of helpful distance from Singapore. It would be presumptuous to assume that it was the pursuit of poetry entirely that led him to his present vocation in academia, though it continues to shape his anthropological research in migrant writing and literary spaces in Singapore.

The hyper-consciousness, even the embarrassment in some instances, towards the frustration of writing poetry, makes itself known throughout Wahid's collection. They are contained within poems articulating multiple concerns in some instances, and in others, are central to the entire poem itself. Take, for example, the poem 'The Year of Bad Poetry'. Its title is self-evident. The 'Year of Bad Poetry' is the year the persona forgets "how to wake up". He writes "voraciously about love, the weather, / my mother. all meaningless things–pretty because you knew / when to spit on them". It is an impulse the speaker recognises of longing to "expel the me / within me onto the page". It is a confessional tension, one that results in "my year of shit poetry". An inverse correlation is identified: "the more I bared myself, the more I hardened / into form". A poetry "in the passive voice, coming smoothly / like lotion to my hands". Vulnerability results in a greater formalism, an emotive distancing. The persona stays "asleep", as "pretty things stayed pretty" and "the ugly / knotted a smog". One wonders about the sense of a long sleep, the heavy looming over the perception, as a representation of a depressive state. The persona's mother throws "hollow pens / in the trash. the sleek rustle of plastic against plastic". It is common to hear the metaphor of the discarded poem among poets; herein, Wahid subverts this somewhat by articulating an experience of disposing of a poem through a completed poem itself. The poem teases out, accepts, and seems to move past a process of confessional experimentation. It is a fine line to tread between self-loathing and growth, of persistence even through a year of creative disillusionment.

This attention to process, to the attempt of writing, recurs, often through the prism of the effort that belies writing. It is a self-awareness undergirded, perhaps, by the formation accorded within the Singapore Poetry Writing Month community, a phenomenon in the 2010s described by literary scholar Samuel Caleb Wee as representing the idea of the "poem made perfect through critique", as much as through the creative writing pedagogy Wahid encountered at the University of Chicago. These self-reflexive references to poetry often arrive alongside a curation of images. In 'Oilspill', the speaker implores that "You cannot simply stay at home and invite the dreams / to return", but better to "lie than to lay limp. Better to tie a bow around a poem." It seems the act of "keeping on", set against the immobility of "psychedelic slicks" or thoughts that have become "black", involves the completion of a poem. In 'Compulsion', the speaker strikes a contrast between a past "when I loved my poems / tough and vertiginous, cast out like a fishing line", and a period after, where one 'Could start a poem with "Once upon a time." / Instead, no words for years'. It is "A verse so dry / you could start a fire". The parchedness of an absent creativity, remedied by the comfort of a lover who "drove [the speaker] to the lake" when he had "asked her for / an ending". The poem 'Persistence' imputes an almost corrosive self-damage from poetry:

These words foment a thousand
toxic clouds. Maybe I have become them all. One
body of gas. Compulsion as poetic form. I cough up
a poem in the shape of my bronchial tract. It reeks
richly of blood. I cradle it in my antiseptic gloves.

Rather than the poem that is a "pliable body", the poem has taken the shape of the speaker's innards, assumed from the inhalation of "toxic clouds" that harm the body. The poem born of pain and turmoil, now held with tenderness, cradled.

In other poems, Wahid seems to respond to the adages and clichés of poetry writing, particularly the seemingly intractable relationship between poetry and trauma. 'I Have Started to See a Therapist' sees the speaker discussing therapy to be what follows when poets "expect / language to run into a glass wall and bleed out / from the shards of a poem". The poem is the fourth the speaker describes writing about a therapist, with none of the previous having "blossomed into an orchard". The therapist, too, is young, "fresh out of grad school", asking the speaker to "open up", "locate the tender spot", to "press down". This is the poem's volta, the partition between two eight-line stanzas, which neatly reveal it to be an anima methodi, the form developed by Desmond Kon and Eric Valles. Perhaps the turn is a breakthrough, represented in italics: "i am sorry / i never said no. i am sorry you could not read / my silence". It is not, as the poem's beginning suggests, the poem that bleeds from the shards of self-harm, but of a kind of movement towards self-awareness, indignation.

This is a thread that extends to 'Every Time I Try to Write an Angry Poem I Get Writer's Block' here, for the speaker attests in the prose poem, which seems to resemble a haibun, that "i keep on catching myself when i write. because am scared that no one will read my poems if they are too angry." The speaker bears an exasperation to the phrase "yell my truth", while also recognising that though anger "is the roof of all writing", "it can also never be its end". It is an anger connected to a maternal anger, responding to the anger of a mother whose rage "seeps through the crackle" over "international calls". It is an anger that seems to compel writing, with the speaker pointing to "fifteen half-empty journals" and "twenty-seven different word docs titled 'new poem'". If the poet is not "so angry all the time", he "will disappear into the fog". Developed and workshopped at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology's Intercultural Studio programme and performed at the 2019 edition of the Melbourne Writers Festival, there is a certain meandering, vernacular quality to the poem, a reflectiveness towards the act of writing that could favour a tighter composition. The fraught relationship that exists between anger and writing in the poem is not insurmountable, but also inescapable.

And in 'Self-Portrait as Self-Portrait', the speaker speaks, perhaps with loathing, of being "the Xerox of trauma poetry". To the speaker, "disgust" conjures a "purity of feeling", and the rush towards self-recognition, as with the "old masters", is too time-consuming. "No, my life is one of immediacy ­– thick beats, line fragments". The distance between the poet and the persona here seems short, underpinned by an impetus to be vulnerable. The aesthetics of the abject, or the grotesque, the violent perhaps, arising from the experience of "the blue son who battered me [screwing] the poetry out of me", the seeming suicidal impulse towards "longing" for "a long lake to walk into". These are "ugly feelings", to quote Sianne Ngai, that accompany the candour of struggling to write a poem, the process that unveils a kind of emotional nakedness. It is not a sense of the confessional in the sense of a single-minded focus on familial or personal traumas, but one that is inextricable from the act of crafting poetry itself. It is an admission that poetry cannot be disconnected from revulsion or other non-cathartic negative effects, without the release that one might come to expect of a narrative arc of emotional resolution.

While these elements of Wahid's poetry have been addressed elsewhere, with Shawn Hoo having described them as "repeated metaphors" and occasionally belabouring the image in a review for the Straits Times, less discussed has been the sharper edge of Wahid's political engagement. Hoo's review focuses on Wahid's self-reflexiveness and love poems such as 'Virginia Woolf'. In doing so, it elides, or turns its attention from Wahid's participation in a particular kind of diasporic politics, particularly given the charged place of the Bangladeshi community, especially migrant labourers, in the Singaporean imagination. One sees in Wahid's collection the entwining with a kind of doubled diasporic experience – once reflected in narratives of his Bangladeshi family's experiences in Singapore, once reflected in his own experiences settling into Chicago. Such poems contain a domesticity and intimacy laced with tenderness, binding together yearning, frustration, contemplation and desire.

I felt a certain kinship in Wahid's poems that address experiences of assimilation into Singapore, in problematising ideas of being Singaporean, or of belonging in Singapore. This is perhaps best represented in the poem 'My Mother Thinks I Dream in Bengali', its title already evocative of a diasporic affinity, or submerged disconnection from, a heritage language. In the speaker's description, it is Bengali that shapes "dreamscapes" that are "flooded by / incontinent rivers that carry language and fish / downstream". This language is to be "hung to dry by an ancient fisherman", a tongue "lush and maternal". Unlike depictions of linguistic severance, this poem instead suggests an overestimation of sorts, symbolised in an image of swimming: that instead of breaking "ankles", the speaker will "break the surface" of the "open sea" with "bearded wisdom", like "tagore's or my grandfather's". The reference to Rabindranath Tagore, the towering figure of Bengali literature, suggests the activation of an almost atavistic affinity, placed alongside the figure of a sagely grandfather, oft-presented as a key figure providing a cultural link to an eroding cultural intimacy. Yet it is the speaker who confesses that he is falling "alone / into a language bleached to bone, / neither english nor bengali".

This sort of indeterminacy draws to mind Homi Bhabha's widely cited image of the 'third space', the liminal and the interstitial. Wahid locates this in the site of the dream; in 'Reflections on the Jamuna', the dreamscape and the body of water reappear as key metaphors for an ancestral affiliation. The Jamuna River fixes the speaker "in a stranglehold" in sleep, "coaxing you to help find its way back home". The advice of a "great-uncle" who describes the "language of rivers" as "borne from the mouths / of their fish"; this collides with the speaker facing "mute, unblinking" answers instead of "revolution" from "a school of herrings". A folkloric wisdom gives way to a pained attempt at comprehension. The nationalism of the Jamuna River as a symbol contrasts with its belonging "to three water bodies", the fish having "no word for the statelessness / of water bodies". The image of the "jamuna bridge" finds its symbolic heft shifting, from the "town" of the present to his mother's "home" of the past. The image of the mother, who, in adulthood, in the poem 'Attrition', speaks an English "probably learned in university / with a stilted reserve that rings false with disuse", who was brought "here" which "ended [her] life". The speaker, observing his mother, considers the notion that:

attrition can be moulded into identity, that
only with loss can she make the space to grow
into her second skin, hardened and neo-colonial.

Assimilation seems to have an inverse relationship with heritage; the gradual loosening of one's familiarity with the identity one brings at the point of immigration is represented as an erosion, reduction and a wearing away. The identity of the immigrant emerges from "spaces", gaps from this attrition, the new layers of a "second skin". The hardening of this new skin suggests a thickening, a sense of resilience, but that which is "neo-colonial" hews to a notion of a Singaporean-ness that not only valorises a British past, but also replicates its power structures. The sense of a cultural loss can only be fully appreciated by a speaker upon recognising what has been lost to begin with. The poem resolves on an image of filial piety – the speaker rising to "water the plants" and "make the coffee", ways of expressing what it is to "love the spaces".

Both poems express a sense of intergenerational interplay, a simultaneous remoteness and intimacy magnified by parallel experiences of growing up in different locales. Between Bangladesh and Singapore, the sense of a growing gulf comes alongside daily affections that happen within a home. It is in other poems, beyond a parental frame, where Wahid takes these considerations into conversation with Singaporean society, of being socialised into it, of resisting its worst impulses, of contending with prejudices against those from a common country of origin. The xenophobia expressed against migrant workers from Bangladesh, amongst other nationalities, has been endemic, resulting in forms of social alienation, maiming and systematised injury, and fatality. One could locate a shift in opinion primarily in recognition of the impossible circumstances many workers faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, forced to undergo lockdown restrictions in dormitories where social distancing was inconceivable, in long stretches away from family and home, of the deleterious effects on bodily and mental health. What preceded it was the emergence of organised activities for writing and poetry composed by migrant writers, led chiefly by labourer-poets from Bangladesh. In his poem 'To the Brave Individuals Fighting the Good Fight by Surveilling and Harassing People of Colour into Wearing Masks Under the Guise of Civicmindendess', Wahid's irritation spills out, exhausted by the racialised and racist blame levied on many South Asian migrant communities, criticising:

men who
bravely put their papers down and tell me to stop drinking,
stop littering, stop fucking around with those pinoy girls,
stop coming here, because i don't owe you a living so
you don't owe me a living either  

The speaker reveals the extent of the shame internalised by the Bangladeshi Singaporean speaker, who "scrubbed [his] elbows / and the back of [his] necks until they turned red" at the age of 10, "[draining] myself of colour".

Wahid's poems mirror two spikes in public attention to migrant workers – the first in the 2010s, surrounding issues of dormitories built closer to residential areas, as well as the riots of 2013, then during the COVID-19 pandemic itself in 2020, where the sheer suffocation of many living arrangements of migrant workers became subject to greater public scrutiny. The former group includes poems such as 'Dream Sonnet for a Good and Advanced Country', 'Regarding Offences Relating to Unlawful Assembly, Committed in December 2013' and 'What We Mean When We Call It a Riot'. The first poem takes as its epigraph a report on how "1,400 residents of the affluent Serangoon Gardens neighborhood petitioned against the proposed construction of a migrant worker dormitory in their area" in 2008. While such opposition was unsuccessful, the epigraph notes that "trees were planted along the perimeter of the dormitory" to keep it "perpetually hidden from view from the public eye". In Walid's poem, critique is directed both at the histrionics of the neighbourhood's residents, mocked as "[waking up] / screaming about the night-eyed animals / who sit on your chest and snap at your heels", as well as the "bureaucrat drained of blood". The migrant labourer is depicted, ironically, as a "spectral they", and the trees as not "[harboring] ill intent". Wahid's use of "they" seeks to satirise a dehumanisation of these individuals, through the counter-act of humanising them as dreaming "of rivers, black and winding, that take them home". Wahid's is a mirror, perhaps, to the emergence of migrant labourer-poets in Singapore, translated and published into English to provide access to a wider reading public, as if to contend for the empathy that comes from recognising a community's ability to dream and to create art. In the poem 'Interlude (After Singapore)', referencing Mary Oliver's poem 'Singapore', the speaker describes the nation as "shrouded / in miraculous fog" and also "murderous fog", upholding an image that is itself "an act of discipline".

The sharp edge of Wahid's rhetoric, stemming from his inhabiting of the interstices between communities, is evident in 'Regarding Offences Relating to Unlawful Assembly, Committed in December 2013'. The poem underscores the absurdity of the number of workers present who are subsumed under the grouping of "rioters", while also highlighting how statistics are selectively weaponised by anonymous xenophobic netizens. It is their veneer of objectivity that leads the speaker to take a passive voice: "FT taking sinkie jobs!!! / eventually the facts told me to go back to my country". In 'What We Mean When We Call It a Riot', the speaker seems to abandon the pretence of poetry in favour of something more argumentative; despite a reliance on lower-case letters, the speaker coolly lays out the facts leading to the riot, from the running over of a worker to the lighting of a fire. With citations and footnotes, the speaker describes how the "truth, too, can be emboldened to lie", like "a tendril curled around a pipe", highlighting the remaining facts obscured by reporting on the riot, such as the sheer number of workers who had to congregate at two bus boarding areas in Little India the sliver of Singapore many are able to access, and the racist epithets used to characterise the workers, mostly South Asian, on social media. Perhaps it is a sense of responsibility that informs Wahid's approach, a sense of witness for a working-class community through an interlocutor shaped by prestigious academic institutions. There is a degree to which one might detect in these poems an outgrowth of a younger anger, stemming from Wahid's attending junior college at the time of the riots, the kindling of which has remained in ensuing disgust towards the racism and xenophobia in both online and governmental discourses at the time. Tonally, Wahid's approach might bring to mind the way that tone policing impels those from ethnic minority groups in Singapore to restrain excessive displays of emotion through the performance of calmness and politeness. 

The re-emergence of migrant workers in the public imagination, coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic, is perhaps best represented by the poem 'Detritus'. Told over six parts, the poem also lends the book its title. The poem opens with a description of the speaker drowning in "a tidal wave / the size of an apartment building / [opening] up beneath me", the abyss of "things I once loved", including "a country built on a landfill". The second part introduces the image of the fish once again, just as the fish described in the earlier 'Reflections on the Jamuna', but this fish is "writhing / in an icebox", subject to a "butcher", to which the speaker admonishes:

run! run! you stupid fish. what god
took your legs away? the mute fish
stare back, stupidly, the butcher swings–

The part that follows returns to the prosaic mode. 'What We Mean When We Call It a Riot' describes incidents of migrant workers who had committed suicide amidst lockdown conditions, a preface to the speaker's anger. In the aforementioned landfill, he describes "a row of hard hats hanging on a corrugated door", a "leaf from a winter tree, the color of three-day-old blood", a "photo of a girl" (ostensibly a worker's child), "a crumpled shopping list", then the stacking of voices that "form a skyscraper", to which the speaker describes "this is how you build something out of nothing". In part V, the speaker describes "watch me puke my words out until / the bay turns green", how the absence of language for anger has led to silence. The poem intersperses Bengali, both in its original script and Romanised, translated in footnotes to describe how language must be found "from the remains of destruction". Part VI contains words and phrases such as "unnatural investigations", "motionless" and "blood", a kind of found poem, or erasure, alluding to the suicides of these workers, before the poem concludes on part VI (sic): "how strange, then: / to die in this icebox dream." The image of the fish contained in inescapable circumstances, with the likelihood of a kind of violence awaiting, seems the interminable conclusion for many who suffered physical and mental duress at the height of the pandemic, without recourse for those who had lost husbands, fathers, sons. Other metaphors abound – the workers packed like canned sardines in their dorm rooms, their foreignness in Singapore being akin to fish out of water, the generic fish presenting them as a plurality. 

The diasporic orientation of Wahid's book extends beyond Bangladesh and Singapore to North America, primarily Chicago. Chicago itself contains Wahid's experiences of intellectual maturation and adulthood, with Singapore traversing the seas to emerge in the imagination of the speaker. These poems are not presented as simple, linear narratives, but colour and characterise the tenor of these visions as dreamlike, sometimes nightmarish. In 'Dream Journal (Balik Kampung)', the poem is presented as a single footnote, in which the speaker is running, path melding Lakeview and Chicago, Singlish emerging through the voices of hostile architecture and environs such as the "wooden doors [telling] me to siam", the disembodied voices mocking the speaker's straining towards whiteness or "oya peya som", the "blades of cold air" that form a barrier to becoming "ang mo kui", to the "flock of plastic geese" that squawk "balik kampung". The poem holds a submerged guilt, represented by the polyphony of mockery across Hokkien and Malay towards the speaker, towards the imperceptible march of assimilation. This linking of Singlish and shame also occurs in the poem 'Your Mother Who', though the Singlish naysayer is concentrated in a single prose-poem rather than being distributed to anthropomorphised entities across a poem. The poem assumes the voice of a Singaporean Chinese Singlish, peppered with discourse particles like "eh" and "leh" and "sia", mocking the speaker becoming "so jiak kantang" after returning from the US, mocking the speaker for his "president" (referencing Trump's parroting of conspiracy theories during his COVID-19 response), and hitting the usual markers of Singaporean-ness to dispute that of the speaker's, such as accusing him of attending an international school or having actually done NS. It is a traversal of shame through Singlish terrain, epitomised at the poem's conclusion in response to the speaker being accused of only using Singlish when writing poetry:

say for fun cannot, say cos I speak cannot, say cos I miss it when I study overseas also cannot, say because I singaporean they close one eye only then can say can.

There is a much more defensive posture adopted here, an insecurity towards those who set the parameters and boundaries, linguistic or otherwise, of who can be considered Singaporean. There is an uneasiness as the speaker flits in and out of Singlish against the imagined discussant, a difficulty in staking a claim to Singlish when its legitimacy and credibility are repeatedly undermined by a faceless interlocuter who identifies the speaker's mistakes in using it. Admittedly, it is a shame I have grappled with to an extent as well, given the relative absence of Singlish in my own home, as a language encountered primarily in social settings. What the poem does not address is the dimensions of class that complicate such notions of shame, whether expressed in the ability to study abroad or in the inflexions one's accent may assume in English.

In other poems, the United States forms the grounding and the backdrop against pains, intimacies and growth, as is to be expected given Wahid's formative university experiences in Chicago. In the poem 'In America My Hair Is Falling out of the Shower', as the speaker's hair falls out, the poem moves between discourses of hair care, from using "a natural conditioner made of olive oil extract" bottled by the speaker's mother, to whiteness being associated with having "good, healthy hair". The poem touches on racialised perceptions of hair, alluding to "an ethiopian girl in my dorm [straightening] her hair because she had to present a pitch", to baldness and its associations with an ageing anthropology professor who knows a lot about Singapore as well as a "chilean banker" who is the namesake of the economics department who "is also very bald", the seeming result of wanting "to put your name on monuments". The poem stitches a host of observations towards hair and its relations to health and achievement, folded within the particular context of an elite American university. The poem 'Pretend' also distils observations from campus, amidst "brambles hidden by the classics building", alluding to the difficulties of pretending to have an American cultural fluency. There is the dissonance of converting "metric to imperial", the strain of pretending to feel "at home", the noting of cultural signifiers from New York and Los Angeles, and the response to a friend's text on how the speaker is doing: "it takes an ocean not to break". In 'On Saturday I Held a Flag', the speaker recounts an experience of marching with a flag "so large thirty other people / carried it with me", protesting the dropping of "seventy thousand tons of fire on children and [calling] it peace" over "five thousand miles away", protesting the genocidal campaign by Israel upon Gaza, as a form of "care". It is an expression of a moral obligation available in the US, but not in Singapore. In 'Prima Laksa Lamian', amidst observations that the speaker's poetry always "comes back to the sea, or some approximation of it", the speaker and an unnamed partner prepare the eponymous noodles from a packet. Prima's ready-to-cook meals have assumed an outsized reputation among culinarily homesick Singaporeans for the quality of its dishes, a seeming distillation of a Singaporean cultural identity into a specific brand. In the poem, preparing Prima's instant laksa becomes a metaphor for love:

The shrimps resurface, and she ladles the soup
evenly into two bowls. This task of clean division.
This unwavering belief in unity. This is what love is,
I think. I tell her about my favourite laksa stall, how
they serve the broth in a clay pot to deepen the zhng.
I'll be too sweaty, she laughs. I'll turn into a puddle.  

The memory of and gustatory nostalgia for Singapore become the backdrop of an unfolding romantic intimacy far away; Wahid's is a new addition to the pantheon of Singaporean poetry about food, inflected through the valences of tenderness and nostalgia.

What God Took Your Legs Away foregrounds Wahid's reflective disposition in poems of becoming, thinking and trying. The poems display, if not neuroticism, then a deep thoughtfulness in their self-reflexivity, unabashed in their tussles with anxiety, shame, anger and indignation. It is this ruminative tendency that weaves together many of Wahid's core concerns: migration, racism, xenophobia, mental health, writing poetry, love, injustice, his relationship with his mother. The collection's final poems are an apt reflection of this. The penultimate poem, 'A Summer of Firsts', is a call-back to the collection's opening poem, 'Poem of Lasts', anaphoric prose poems with each line beginning with the words "first" and "last" respectively. There is a hyper-specificity to each of the speaker's "first" experiences, with the poem emphasising this novelty: a first sublet, first "communal meal in maryland", the first person the speaker meets in Chicago being the first who kills himself, "first peach bellini with first year friend groups that will not last", "first third wheel situation where I am not the third wheel", "first kiss", "first time I understood the cliches", "first time in greektown", "first broccolini", "first test". There is the potential for such deep specificity to alienate a reader, just as there is potential for a reader to be drawn into the honesty of their professions. In honouring the compulsion to write for himself, Wahid seems to have discarded an anxiety to placate the reader. In the collection's closing poem 'Elegy for Crisis', Wahid chooses to end in a crisis not of Singapore, but seemingly, in Chicago, describing its "public safety crisis", a "dumpster fire". It is an eruption of anger that sees the speaker turning back, once again, to his mother:

I am overwhelmed
with an urge to throw my shoe at the dais. Is this not
a form of inheritance, too? Before she was my mother,
my mother held banners and yelled at dictators, men
who dined out on crises with silver paws. This rage,
this earthen thing she's given me. I want to nourish it.

This seems an echo of Wahid's earlier poem 'Every Time I Try to Write an Angry Poem I Get Writer's Block', a reclamation of anger as worthy and deserving of cultivation, away from the racialised baggage it often assumes in Singapore. The invocation of the speaker's mother's youth draws to mind another set of contrasts between Singapore and Bangladesh, their independence won through negotiated and violent means respectively, two nations born within years of one another. With What God Took Your Legs Away containing eight years of Wahid's writing and thought, the poem's ending seems an indication of the direction of his poetry and scholarship in years to come. A rage, nourished, in service of a vision of justice, for the disenfranchised in Singapore and beyond.

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