Editor’s Preface

Issue 14 marks seven years since The Tiger Moth Review was brought into the world. The inspiration behind the journal’s founding then in 2018 had been to fill in the environmental gap in the  Singapore literary ecosystem, keeping in mind our commitments to promoting diversity and featuring marginalised voices--human and more-than-human. In these seven years, the journal has been proudly self-funded and fully independent, with the occasional donation by contributors. Yet, it is always encouraging and helpful to receive financial support. 

We are deeply thankful to the Ho Family, particularly Ho Ren Chun who has been an ardent supporter and advocate of the journal’s work, for their generous sponsorship for issues 14 and 15. Their belief in the work that we do has enabled us to be able to remunerate contributors of Issues 14 and 15 with a modest honorarium. We hope that this will be a lasting relationship, and trust that the Universe will continue to touch the hearts of send benefactors our way to support us in our environmental artivism.

Issue 14 is a modest issue comprising 16 submissions featuring the work of 17 poets, writers and interdisciplinary artists. We open with Jonathan Chan’s “meditations on a bean” (Singapore) urging us to “consider the seed” from neighbouring lands, the poem bringing to the fore our relationships and entanglements with “distant tongue[s]” and “tired village[s]” in savouring something as simple as our morning cup of coffee. Audrey Wu’s “Lambing Season” (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA) takes us to the birthing ground where the narrator reconnects with her own mother as she helps a more-than-human mother to bring its baby into the world. The theme of mothering is continued with Rina Garcia Chua’s (unceded tm̓xwúlaʔxw (lands) of the syilx Okanagan peoples-The Philippines) poem mediating “invisible/line[s] that we draw across oceans” of life and death through the symbol of the mango.

Thomas Dambo’s “Trolls” (Odense, Denmark) shows us how “beautiful things can be made out of trash”; Anna Mallikarjunan’s “A Fledgling’s Tale” (Montreal, Canada) teaches us to trust in the “natural state of being”. “Wind Woven” by Emma Watkins (Wyoming, USA) invokes the speaker’s “earthbound and earthborn” state while interdisciplinary artists Zen Teh (Singapore) & SueKi Yee (Berlin-Malaysia)’s Phenomenology of Light and Rhythms of the Earth hope to open up “a space where people can take time to process and discuss their embodied perspectives on light and darkness, and how these ever co-existing elements are inextricably linked to life rhythms, memories, pollution, urban development, safety and surveillance, environmental changes, accessibility of energy, and volatile global political states”.

The issue closes with my student Christine Koh’s  poem “Remember” (Singapore):

Remember you are water—

that the salt in your blood 

once flowed through the ocean,

that the tides in your chest 

rise and fall with the moon. 

Indeed, let us remember that the Earth “remembers [us] too”, and that we need to remember our obligations to our Earth, as stewards, as children, as earthbound beings inhabiting this place but for a brief moment in time.

Esther Vincent Xueming

The Tiger Moth Review