Description
Praise
About the Author

Winner of the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize (Poetry in English)

Last published in 2016, AFTERIMAGE is proud to restore to circulation Samuel Lee’s A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore as part of its RENDITIONS series, committed to preserving and reintroducing culturally defining works.

A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore is a 19th century reference book (on philology? art history? anthropology? nobody remembers) that fell into a tropical swamp and was rescued, then lovingly restored, by a nice lady in curlers.

Caked in organic matter too dense to scrub off, the pages of Samuel Lee's debut collection reveal visions and premonitions of a city filled with characters engaged in their own private sorrows, both minute and expansive. To read him is to be lost in the aisles of millennia.
“In A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore we encounter perhaps the most innovative, consummate, satisfyingly difficult and distinctive voice to date in the Ten Year series. This collection in its fresh arresting imagery reveals a new poet assured, deftly doing poetry.”
—Richard Angus Whitehead, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal

“Again and again, the poet pines for a simpler world and for an escape from globalisation… Somehow the products know more, and feel more, than we do.”
—Natasha Stallard, Manchester Review

“[R]eading Lee is to appreciate that magically imaginative sense of ambiguity in making meaning of and from the everyday, embracing the neutral, perhaps child-like point of possibility where the distant horizon can be both wall and sea.”
—Jerome Lim, poetry.sg
Trained in art history and literature at the National University of Singapore, Yale University and the University of Chicago, Samuel Lee (b. 1992) is a writer who lives and works in Singapore.

The manuscript of his first poetry collection, A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore (2016), was selected for the inaugural edition of Manuscript Bootcamp, and was subsequently published under the Ten Year Series imprint at Math Paper Press. The collection has since been awarded the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018, making him one of the youngest winners of the award to date.

Series

A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore