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Grace Chia

A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Child

  • 1 Goya under the influence of a 1998 Shiraz: Saturn II
  • 2 Before Paradise Is Lost
  • 3 A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Child
  • 4 Deliverence
  • 5 Daughter
  • 6 Made in Singapore: iCordelia
  • 7 Musing on the Merlion Myth
  • 8 Kucinta at Raffles Place
  • 9 Far Gone
  • 10 The Last Headman of Ubin
Language: english
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A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Child

The butterfly outgrew the child
in the drawing my daughter did —
a caterpillar frozen in motion;
long turd green, pink lips, curled limbs,
his turn next to bear wings.
A daisy of carmine 
salutes a bendy tree,
brown-barked with lime leaves, 
ochre sacs of round fruits 
pregnant with spindly secrets 
the tuft bush can’t hear, its twigs
daubed red with a brush too big to
fit its shape while a citrus sun
peeks from the edge of the paper
at right angles, seven sticks of rays
proclaiming summer. 
In this, I catch my daughter’s proxy, 
a wild-haired imp with two seeds for eyes,
moon mouth, hair in a top knot
of burnished terracotta, 
purple tunic and twiggy thighs.
She is small-sized amidst the giants,
the bonsai palm, the lemon star,
leaping without shadow above the
mustard ground, azure coloured
in for both air and sky.
I see she has crayoned in the
heaven around her, clouds 
a hair’s breath away,
the artist herself afloat in blue.
This is the world my daughter creates, 
no lines separate her will from the real;
no one has taught her how not to draw 
or where horizons end and start,
what is allowable in dreams
or how her eyes should learn
the gaps between spectrums.
The young are colour blind.
All children see rainbows
no matter rain, shine, snow or storm
in every pale wing, broken or torn.  

© Grace Chia
From: Mother of All Questions
Singapore: Math Paper Press, 2017
ISBN: 9789811150845
Audio production: The Literary Centre and Sing Lit Station
Categories: life & relationship, family, child, mother, identity (personal), infancy & youth, love, time, art & painting, nature, animals, plants

Translations:

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(Deliverence)   
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Grace Chia

photo © Grace Chia
* , Singapore, Singapore
lives in: Singapore, Singapore

Grace Chia (b. 1973) is a poet, writer, journalist and editor from Singapore. She is the author of several poetry books, a novel and a collection of short stories. Her debut poetry collection womango (1998) deals with confessional poetry, poetic prose, concrete poetry and performance poetry to explore themes of identity politics from an Asian, female point of view.  Her second collection of poems, Cordelia (2012), was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize 2014 for poetry. Her third poetry collection Mother of All Questions came out in 2017.

 photo © Grace Chia
Grace Chia's writing has been widely anthologised in Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong and the US, e.g. in Anthology of English Writing in Southeast Asia, Singapore Literature in English, The Brooklyn Rail, Poetry.sg, Stylus Poetry Journal, SingaporePoetry.com and many more and translated for die horen, La Traductiere and Knijzevne Novine for Germany, France and Serbia, respectively. She was the first female writer from Singapore to be invited to the Austin International Poetry Festival, Queensland Poetry Festival and National Young Writers Festival in Australia, and she features regularly at the Singapore Writers Festival. She is the editor of the prose anthology We Are Family, and Junoesq Literary Journal, which she founded. The inaugural NAC-NTU Writer-in-Residence for 2011-2012, she has taught creative writing at Nanyang Technological University and DigiPen Singapore Institute of Technology.

Publications
  • womango

    poems

    Singapore: Rank Books, 1998

  • Ajar

    poems

    Singapore: Ethos Books, 2011

  • Cordelia

    poems

    Singapore: Ethos Books, 2012

  • Every Moving Thing That Lives Shall Be Food

    short stories

    Singapore: Math Paper Press, 2016

  • The Wanderlusters

    novel

    Singapore: Math Paper Press, 2016

  • The Cuckoo Conundrum

    chapbook, fiction

    Singapore: Ethos Books, 2016

  • Mother of All Questions

    poems

    Singapore: Math Paper Press, 2017

Awards
  • NAC Creation Grant for her collection of short stories

Links
  • Interview for World Literature Today

    Website
  • Grace Chia on poetry.sg

    Website
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