These poems strive to leap out of the collection. These poems build a bed, watch a cult film, read the news. They take endless flights between the personal and the political, between the specific contours of Singapore’s landscape and the broader trajectories of global movements and inequity. But they can never find their way home.

it took me eight years but here I am, carving, carving
against my wounds until I hit the bone and start

Written over eight years, Wahid Al Mamun’s debut collection of poems is an intricate exploration of migration, memory and love, built on the intersections of private griefs and communal narratives, uttered in a voice both tender and unflinching. What God Took Your Legs Away deftly interrogates the tensions between the body, the nation and their intertwined histories, and asks what it means to write with—and against—one’s (be)longings. It’ll bring you to your knees and take your breath away.