Let Me Tell You Something About That Night: Strange Tales - Hardcover

CYRIL WONG is the author of seven poetry collections, including tilting our plates to catch the light (firstfruits 2007) and Excess Baggage & Claim (Transit Lounge 2007). He has received both the Singapore Literature Prize (2006) and the National Arts Council's Young Artist Award for Literature (2005) in his country. His poems have appeared in Chinese Erotic Poems (Everyman's Library 2007) and Language for a New Century (W. W. Norton 2008), as well as in journals like Atlanta Review and Poetry International. He is presently on a Ph.D. research scholarship for English Literature at the National University of Singapore.

Wong takes fairytales and works them into a surreal lustre...the heart of these stories gestures to a time before fairytales were saccharine fantasies. Their magic springs from the fact that they incorporate within realms crammed with elves and water spirits and weird metamorphoses an unvarnished sense of life's desolations. Some deal overtly with sexuality: The Boy With The Flower That Grew Out Of His Ass is a fable of wounding poignancy about homophobia; The Queen & Her Eventual Knowledge Of Love is a post-mortem coming-out story. Others stray towards more classical magical realism. A vivid collection that will enchant and disturb. --Cameron Woodhead, The Age, Aug. 29 2009