Can we ever go home again? This question lies at the heart of Homecomings by Wong Yoon Wah, a veteran Singaporean poet and a prominent voice in global Chinese literature.In these poems, Wong delves into his country’s precolonial and colonial history, the natural heritage of the rainforest, his memories of his kampung hometown, his heartbreak at the closure of Nanyang University, and the global traumas of European colonisation and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.He expresses the loneliness and dislocation of the Chinese diaspora, as well as the sorrow of his generation as so many of their cultural touchstones are destroyed in the name of progress. At the same time, he embraces a planetary mode of thinking, sensing rapport with fellow humans from distant cultures and geographies, identifying even with the plants and animals that compose our ecosystem.Filled with nostalgia, bitter irony and strange beauty, Homecomings is a love letter to the past, revisiting its glories, making peace with t
