homesick

“homesick reads like your ancestors started a group chat with your inner child. nor writes from the wreckage, after god, men and country have all let you down, and still lays the table like love might show up anyway. I felt held, then lovingly dragged. Then handed a mic and told, go on, sing.”
—Pooja Nansi, author of We Make Spaces Divine

“If nostalgia is the unappeased longing to return to a past we beheld in innocence, and the future is pure fantasy, these poems ebb and flow in between. Here is a tender-hearted but unflinching poet who beholds the painful lessons of desire and the vicissitudes of relationships with awe, gentle honesty and an undercurrent of unwavering love.”
—Cyril Wong, poet and fictionist

“In nor’s world, the emancipation of self arrives in tandem with love. Love’s tendrils emerge in the earliest memories of their grandfather, then refract through the men who slip in and out of their youth, before blooming in life- saving, found kinship. It is through these mirrors of relations that we are able to see nor as they shape-shift into a mermaid, bride, sojourner, enigma and lover. Between dancefloor and glittering sea, we are witness to the converging of temporalities and rhizomatic possibilities of fantasy. Yet it is a dreamscape rooted in survival, in the ekeing out of one’s truth within a normative society that hews at such expansiveness. Where there is loss, there is space for grief and still: surging desire. nor’s overflowing presence is antidote to these afflictions. They are there for themselves. They are there for the world.”
—Charmaine Poh

“In poems that throb, bite and sometimes burst into laughter, nor captures what it means to come of age queer in a world where belonging is packaged by the State and sold back to us in pop songs. This is the poetry of the in-between: of feeling too much, too soon, and in all the wrong places. nor writes like they’re breaking open their own ribs and letting us climb into their very core— trapping your gaze even when it’s easier to look away. A dazzling debut, homesick distils their unbridled vision as a multidisciplinary artist, fluidly melding genres like molten glass.”
—Chandreyee Ray, culture journalist

“The most charming thing about nor’s very contemporary, very defiant debut collection is its genuinely eclectic range of poetic registers, contexts, imageries, and moods. Meanwhile, the most meaningful takeaway is the author’s audacious conviction in the full and radical potential of their personhood in a world that is already doomed. And it is this formidable combination that makes the book and its creator irresistible.”
—Bart Seng Wen Long, artist

nor is a multidisciplinary artist whose work situates identity and community within speculative timelines through frameworks of gender performance, ethnographic portraits and transnational histories. nor’s writings have been published in Singa Pura-Pura: Malay Speculative Fiction from Singapore, Making Kin: Ecofeminist Essays from Singapore as well as Brown is Redacted: Reflecting on Race in Singapore.

Mok Zining is obsessed with random things: orchids, arabesques, sand. Her work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Rumpus and Witness Magazine, among others. The Orchid Folios will be her first published book. Currently, she is working towards an MFA at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where she teaches creative writing. She spends most of her free time dancing.