Intruder
Ethos Books — 2014 (reprinted in 2024)
About
At home with loneliness and passing encounters, can we be familiar with another or even ourselves? Does love outweigh the uncertainty of its memory? In his third collection, Jerrold Yam ushers us into a traveller's world through sensitive and enquiring eyes, navigating a landscape of flitting figures, thoughts and emotions. Intruder is an attempt to make sense of the impermanent structures that hold up one's life. Home, like love, may be a fiction that we must resist claiming for our own. After all, can we—and should we—be more than intruders?
Reviews
The Straits Times - “Filial duties, family ties and the search for identity are the themes of Yam’s heartfelt, personal poetry.”
The Smart Local - “10 milestone books written by Singaporeans.”
Jerrold’s poems have always been startlingly tender, soulful and enigmatic. But there’s an intriguing new wave of experimentation with form in this volume, as he strives to map out his relationship with his father and his years abroad as an undergraduate in the UK.
— Ng Yi-Sheng, recipient of the Singapore Literature Prize
Jerrold Yam writes with an old voice and the youthful abandon of a poet out of his safe shell; a strong conviction of his depthless solitude yet weak in the presence of love and desire. His poems are lamentable etudes of one-word titles so vocal of absence and longing they are heartrending to those in the thick throes of love’s discovery, loss and reconciliation.
— Grace Chia, poet
Continuing the grace and eloquence of Yam’s earlier collections, Intruder at once strips back and finely embroiders the moments of connection, strangeness and longing between us. Each moment of excavation is touched by the sting of hard-won, lost and lived experiences. Still, there is a grace in Yam’s seamless skate — from thought to thought, between people, places, and the changing faces of home. In these poems, Yam braves a deepening that is at once reflective and tense, with a sensual voice that is fast attaining heat.
— Jasmine Ann Cooray, poet