Eating your vegetables. Listening to ghost stories. Navigating schoolyard politics.
Small Droll Things draws inspiration from Robert Schumann’s Kinderszenen to trace how a child comes to apprehend the beauty and brutality of everyday existence. Moving through crystalline poems towards a haunting prose coda, this suite of thirteen lyric pieces offers a rare and quietly unsettling meditation on growing up in Singapore.
" A bijou gem." —— Yeow Kai Chai (Co-editor, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore)
"Droll as hell. What tough poems, like steel traps so finely made one, one takes them for jewellery until one trips them." —— Peter Trachtenberg (Author of The Twilight of Bohemia and Antoher Insane Devotion)
About the author
Zhang Ruihe has published across creative non-fiction, poetry, and short fiction. She received the Golden Point Award for English Poetry in 2013 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023. The seed of this chapbook was planted while she was completing an MFA in Writing at the University of Pittsburgh.