ZHOU SIVAN
email: zhou.sivan@gmail.com
CHAPBOOKS
The Geometry of Trees, Lisbon: Sputnik & Fizzle, 2022.
A poetic sequence on queer desire and trees in contemporary and medieval settings
Links to purchase: Sputnik & Fizzle (online and the US) | After 8 Books (Paris) | Epigram Books (Singapore) | Zabriskie (Berlin) | Materia Prima (Porto) | Hong Kong
Excerpt:
Look Ma this poem has no hands and no will
It’s ready to retire without a bicycle or a Buraq
It follows the curfews of a dictionary entry
That took conflicting vowels of chastity a Janus
Sound that sends the world into high alert
Can I just declare my books on one bended knee
—from “Muskweed is a dialect on another epigraph”
Sea Hypocrisy, New York and Chicago: DoubleCross Press and Projective Industries, 2016.
On media and state responses to migrants and refugees in Malaysia; assigned reading for a creative writing course at the University of Albany, SUNY, Spring 2017; and courses at Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), Spring 2018, and the University of Hong Kong (HKU), Spring 2021; micro-reviewed by Jeremy Hoevenaar
Out of Print on DoubleCross Press | Borrow on WorldCat
Excerpt:
“there was no foul play” meaning everyone is entitled to a natural cause of death but only ex post facto and on paper
meanwhile crude anger due to semantic cleansing always subsides like a pebble dropping in fiction
like an insect’s soundless breath
like an imaginary bear mounting the ampoules of Buddha’s fingers
like concise sutras playing the numbers game
—from “Line Break Courage”
Zero Copula, e-published by Delete Press, 2015.
On desire and modulating the sonnet form
PDF available here
Excerpt:
Cross-cultural, my love for you
is really old, like a solitary oak crowded out by olive trees.
With sharp funicular arms, it naturalizes every metaphor,
multiplies with precise needlework Pinocchio’s error, and
lives what lie the soul is permitted, only avoiding the one
last noose every lonely dove hangs on.
–from “Spanish Oak”
ESSAYS AND REVIEWS
“Mahua Modernist Poetry as a Translational Practice,” co-authored with Zhou Hau Liew, Full Stop Quarterly (August 2017), 19–29.
Ito Hiromi, Wild Grass on the Riverbank, reviewed in Chicago Review 59:4/60:1 (2016), 241–44.
JOURNAL AND ANTHOLOGY PUBLICATIONS (SELECTED)
Almost Island, Asymptote, Columbia Review, Columbia New Poetry, The Coffin Factory, Dispatches, Lana Turner, Naratif | Kisah, The Little Basket: New Malaysian Writing 2016 (Fixi Novo), Asian American Writers’ Workshop, New Village, The Rialto, The Salt Anthology of New Writing 2013, Southeast Asian Review of English