From A (Undesirable ) Diary

Jason Wee’s fourth poetry collection is an imaginative reconstruction of a history of permission and prohibition in the Malayan Peninsula. Through excerpts from a fictive publisher’s diary, Wee trace encounters and negotiations with the censor and the censored, beginning just before the implementation of the laws against ‘undesirable publications.’ The central section carries us into the difficulties of making literature in the present, each diary entry a record of single painful incidents, each a study of our acts of reading both the printed word and the world. The devastating final section acknowledges the history of books and bookmaking as a history of foreclosures, while staying alert to art’s possibilities.