Bitter Punch

By Loh Guan Liang

Shortlisted for the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize


Bitter Punch is Loh Guan Liang’s second collection of poetry. With a wry eye for the everyday and its often forgotten characters, Loh explores what it means to live and love in the city. Even as it depicts the tension between ourselves and the spaces we inhabit, Bitter Punch still seeks sweetness in life’s hard, bitter moments.

"At the heart of Bitter Punch is the passing of love. Loh Guan Liang has constructed a personal map of elegiac half-escapes although his book is also a love letter to the enigmatic city that has been sustaining him. These poems will haunt you with its cool detachment, its overthinking, and its sombre rhythm in search of connection through words."
-Gwee Li Sui, poet and critic

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ethos Books
• Release date: Apr 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9789811412141

Book preview

Like a keen flâneur, Loh Guan Liang collects penetrating snapshots of the everyday in the city, and, like an artful cinematographer, turns them into silent moving images. His observations offer no false consolation, only the unsweetened taste of reality, acerbic as black coffee. Drink from this book of poems. Let it wake you up.

—Wong Shu Yun, author of Do You Fear the Line

The journey through our emotions rarely has a destination. Or a map. Guan Liang’s Bitter Punch, however, provides a beacon as we walk the roads of pitch-black uncertainty and brutal realities.

—Joelyn Alexandra, editor of fiction zine Pulp Toast / Roti Bakar

Most strikingly, it is his last lines that pack a punch, leaving one high on a lethal mix of imagery, form—and imagination.

—Chew Yi Wei, Postdoctoral Fellow at Nanyang Technological University

This is a mesmerising collection full of wit, wordplay and wisdom.

—Felix Cheong, NAC Young Artist of the Year (2000)

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

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B I T T E R

P U N C H

Bitter Punch © Loh Guan Liang, 2016

ISBN: 978-981-09-7427-5 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-981-14-1214-1 (E-book)

Published under the imprint Ethos Books

by Pagesetters Services Pte Ltd

28 Sin Ming Lane #06-131

Singapore 573972

www.ethosbooks.com.sg

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All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction.

Names, characters, places, events and incidents

are either the products of the author’s imagination or

used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance

to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events

is purely coincidental.

Cover design by Ahdini Izzatika

Design and layout by Pagesetters Services Pte Ltd

Printed by Ho Printing Singapore Pte Ltd

National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing in Publication Data

Bitter punch / Loh Guan Liang.

Loh, Guan Liang, 1984-

Singapore : Ethos Books, [2016]

Identifiers

OCN 934014952

ISBN 978-981-09-7427-5 (pbk)

ISBN 978-981-14-1214-1 (ebk)

Classification

LCC PR9570.S53

DDC S821--dc23

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Bitter Punch

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