jonathan chan

azalea dialogues, forthcoming spring 2027 with @gasherpress azalea dialogues is a collection that centres narratives of the korean diaspora beyond the usual frames of the U.S. and japan. it contains poems about north koreans in london. korean adoptees in france. zainichi koreans in film. poems after the Korean War. poems responding to the work of Doho Suh. translations of the poems of Tang dynasty poet Choe Chiwon. poems of rock icons from China and Russia. poems of hallyu. poems of koreans in singapore, from the prison guards of the Japanese occupation to those here today. poems of my own family. “The editors for the prize were drawn to the collection’s poetic revisioning of history in its patchwork storytelling across time and space—a palimpsest cast against (non)location. Voices and nature merge into a chimera of language, hope, violence, and resurrection that challenges traditional notions of narrative and silence, forming a new sounding of time.” with all gratitude to my family, friends, teachers, guides, and editors

of toil and tears, movement and wrestling. it is with great joy and enormous gratitude that i’d like to share the forthcoming publication of bright sorrow, my second collection of poems. this book finds its origin in many places. in the years of thinking about repentance and grief. in the clarity provided by the writing and teaching of Christian Wiman, who wrote so urbanely about facing the bright abyss. in the encouragements toward and pressure of putting together a manuscript. in the patience and guidance of so many teachers, mentors, poets, and friends. it is a great privilege to be able to work with @landmarkbooks and @ekgoh once again, on a book that complements and departs from my first. my hope is that this collection brings to mind all the ways that suffering and joy come together, in daily life, in the luminosity that comes even amidst the profound devastations of war, sickness, and genocide, in the ways that each of us contends with the light and the darkness in and around us. i invite you into the bright sorrow and to all the places to which it will bring you

10.9.24 Singapore Literature Prize 2024 Awards Ceremony, with Mom ‘going home’ began its life as a manuscript dwelling on the question of what shapes a person. questions of family, nationality, citizenship, and ethnicity swirled in the poems i’d pulled together. poems of spirituality and a relationship with nature came later, as i prayed and thought and sat and wrote. many revisions later, it became clear that the book’s central theme would be that of finding a home. growing up as i did, between places and passports, languages and lifestyles, what did it mean to be at home with myself, with Singapore, with faith, and with all the other places i’d also known as home? how could i have contended that a home could be something of my own making, a feeling of comfort i could have of being reconciled to God, to myself? these are questions that i suspect will never fully go away, though at the same time, reflecting on the past two years since the book has been published, the notion of a home, to me, has remained vexed, contested, and elusive. what is home to the migrant, to the exile, to the refugee? what is home to one who has had to leave their community for the promise of economic reward, or because of some unmitigated political or natural disaster? what is home to someone displaced, who has never lived in liberation, who clings to the hope that their homeland might someday be free? at the awards ceremony, i was delighted to hear tributes to the poet Suratman Makarsan, witness the participation of President and poet Tharman Shanmugaratnam, and celebrate the triumphs of all those whose books were affirmed and awarded. i was heartened to hear that @jeremy_tiang would donate his winnings to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund and the Transformative Justice Collective. and i left, ever grateful to have found some measure of home in my corner of Singapore’s literary community. with thanks to the @singaporebookcouncil for shortlisting my book for Best Debut: Poetry in English and @landmarkbooks for giving my poems their home. glory to God. (📸: @nicyeozh )

contra imperio in conversation with Karan Kapoor at @onlypoemsmag my gratitude for the thoughtful questions, thinking through Spain, the touristic gaze, poetry, history, empire and music more at the link in bio

Lorca, i have forgotten how the unending sun and sprawling hills make soft an ivory-hard head and heart, the sweltering embrace of summer in full, unrelenting brightness. palm trees line the road to the beach, vacationers in floating hotels on the sea beyond the castle. the fields and farmlands roll by, vast acreage and the neatness, the nearness of symmetric olive groves. the tracks and the trains shake, snaking across the mountainside. the filter of sun is captured in the expanding aperture of film. Lorca, in this delicious, enveloping heat i remembered the eternal summer of a spotted mind. …. Read the full feature on our magazine website! . . . #poetoftheday #poetcommunity #onlypoems #poetry_addicts #writersandpoets

reading @richard_siken thanks to top editor @joanofradius and to @yongshuhoong for commissioning now out in the latest issue of QLRS

bright sorrow turns one grateful that it’s finding its place 💐: @mangrove____.mood

slipping from Eunoia Review (Singapore, March 2026)

on reservist from Eunoia Review (Singapore, March 2026)

false starts and restarts from Eunoia Review (Singapore, March 2026)

‘biblicism’ from ‘bright sorrow’ 🎥: @coloureversal

“prayer scattering over chapped lips, over corner pharmacies and rattling cars, the rumble of pipes” bright sorrow, now available at Wardah Books 📸: @wardahbooks