Shawn Hoo is a poet from Singapore and the author of Of the Florids (Diode Editions, 2022). His poems are anthologised in New Singapore Poetries (Gaudy Boy, 2022) and can be found in journals such as Queer Southeast Asia, New Delta Review and Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine. He is Translation Tuesdays Editor at Asymptote.

Books by Shawn Hoo:

Other poems on the web by Shawn Hoo:
"Mempat"
Three poems
Two poems
"Deferred Sayings for Future Occasions"

Shawn Hoo's Website.

Shawn Hoo on Twitter.

About Of the Florids:

"If poetry be that sly accomplice to taxonomy, its fall guy, its wingman, its muse, then what a bird of a book Of the Florids is—meaning it makes a ruckus, ruffles our feathers, and unlocks the cage that is language so that we might be set free. What a wild, worldly, ravishing collection this is!"
—Lawrence Lacambra Ypil

"In this sequence of erudite and startlingly lucid poems, Shawn Hoo asks us to behold the gulf between knowledge systems and the slipperiness of visual representations and mental events. He presents scenes from the writing of natural history in archipelagic Southeast Asia, opening them up on the bench, as it were, to examine the vital organs of language, memory, power, and desire, still very much alive within them. It seems to me that each poem operates like a small machine whittling down the raw material of history into something like a razor. But the effect is not one of reduction or spareness. Hoo's thematizations of nonhuman life—indeed, that which is unseen and speculated upon—sparkle like new instruments for inquiry and imagination. I felt transformed, after encountering the referentiality and mystery of this set of poems, into a kind of early-modern florilegium, upon which the wisdom of multiple botanical, aqueous, and geological realms have been impressed."
—Samuel Lee

"Hoo drops language into the caldron of natural history, causing it to overflow into complicit etymologies and complex heredities. With close, yet inventive, attention to the animal, insect, and plant life of his home, Singapore, and its surrounding Southeast Asia, all always at the mercy of the human, Hoo turns natural history inside-out to reveal its entirely human construction. Focused on the intersection of history and ecology, this compelling work acts as a call to responsibility."
—Cole Swensen

"Shawn Hoo's Of the Florids showcases the interception of hyperactive language and concepts. These ambitious poems are like a turnstile that refuses to remain still. History, the body, cultures, the pastoral, the urban: poems in this collection glitter and make their mark in these thematic trajectories. 'The florids are the sparring grounds of rootless epics,' as Hoo's words turn into futuristic architectures erecting in a challenging reality no one quite knows how has come into being."
—Nicholas Wong