Tuesday 19 July 2011

Night Fish by Kristine Ong Muslim

Night Fish is a small and perfectly formed chapbook from Kristin Ong Muslim. The poems are populated by ghosts and souls and, in the poem Extremities by seemingly disembodied limbs.

There's also a lot of water in these poems. The slippery water that eludes definition in Hypergraphia:

...........................................................................A
watery city of typography. All the pebbles are
letters desperately forming into words. The
handwriting is not quite legible yet.


It is the water of rising sea levels in Night Fish, a beautiful evocation of the changed (and likely disastrous) world we may face in the future:

From now on, there will never be any flat land.
just water. All words will be derivatives of
fixed names denoting the ocean surface bearing
the image of the moon.



It's a lovely, haunting, subtly disturbing chapbook.


Night Fish by Kristine Ong Muslim is available from Elevated Books, an imprint of Shoe Music Press

5 comments:

The Weaver of Grass said...

I am just reading a book about the changing face of Alaska due to global warming Juliet.

Titus said...

Looks interesting. I'm really taken by that first extract - beautiful.

Draffin Bears said...

Sounds interesting Juilet, thanks for sharing and will look out for it at the library.

Hope that you are having a lovely week

Hugs
Carolyn

Hannah Stephenson said...

I love your comments about this book--I may start sharing snippets from what I'm reading over at my blog (you do it really well!).

Anonymous said...

Sounds good - I like the size of a chapbook for poetry.