Editors' Note

Welcome to the inaugural issue of We Are A Website.

Named for the seasons (or lack thereof) in Singapore, this issue features poems which get better with each re-reading, and art we will never tire of looking at. An urban sensibility informs the works we have fallen for and picked. Hao Guang Tse's "Glass Elevator", with its parentheses within parentheses, is a dizzying feat; dinging in our hearts like the love song of an office serf. Ang Ming Wei's verse triptych, "Heart Soul Body", rewrites the landscape as body (or is it the other way around?), etched by loneliness and longing.

Rodrigo V. Dela Peña Jr.'s "In Case of Emergency" serves up the poignant paranoia of daily living three ways, playing with form to evoke and cycle through anxiety, action, obsession and reflection. In his lines, we are transported, one foot hovering before we step off the curb, in the wake of the crying ambulance - disaster averted - elated and guilty to be alive. Jau Goh's hypnotic geometric drawings jive with and offer calming counterweight to this suite of poems. Both poet and painter traffic in different angles.

Elsewhere, Goh's acrylic paintings find serenity in simplicity - conjuring up mysterious depths, and golden stupas nestled in mist-shrouded mountains.

Meanwhile, Krystle Huan's illustrations make us smile with their wit. They stand boldly alone here, like the cheese in the dell.

Memory (the grasping at, the preservation of) is another theme that runs through this first offering from us. Sebastian Ernst's architectural research project straddle art and analysis. His photographs of Singapore's old podium-tower blocks - blocky, stackable - are themselves rigorous and modular, underscoring the same-ness conceived as utopia by pioneer planners. Helen Palmer's poems are rich in the colours and flavours of childhood or young love, whole lives spooling out or tumbling forth, turning upon the words "years later".

Last but not least, Euginia Tan's pieces (taken from her third poetry collection, to be published by Ethos Books in 2016) are a family of fragments - a portrait of a marriage in shards, in a daughter's imagination; an archivist archived in the beholder's mind; a museum measured in unmeasurables.

We hope you enjoy this issue as much as we enjoyed putting it together. We thank all who submitted their work to us. Most of all, we thank our contributors for trusting us with their words and art.


Eva Aldea, Clara Chow, Christine Lee and Yen Yen Wu
We Are A Website editors
Singapore
June 2015