Incantations/Incarcerations/ by Bernice Chauly

• author: Bernice Chauly
• publisher: Gerakbudaya
• published in: 2019
• language: English

'When poetry collections are obsessed with the discovery of voice of the newness of style, it is refreshing to read poems that are stripped bare, fierce, and direct. Incantatory, yes, and imbued with the structures of ritual, but also blunt and unapologetic in the way that is wrought from a belief in the capacious possibilities of the personal. These are the poems of the mid-life: on motherhood and memory, on the love for daughters and lovers. But they are also grief songs for a wounded world, and built from the ability to bear witness to the contours of affliction– and to sing.'
Lawrence Lacambra Ypil, author of The Experiment of the Tropics and co-winner of the Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize.

Incantations/Incarcerations is a rumination on ageing, menopause, losing one's children to the world, climate change, and the slow decline of the body. In this collection, Bernice Chauly will once again chart the unsayable and the confessional, and speak from places where few dare to write from- of the older woman, desire and loneliness, and of the certainty of death.

About the author:
Bernice Chauly is the author of seven books of poetry and prose and has won the Readers’ Choice Awards in 2012 and 2018 for her memoir Growing Up With Ghosts and the novel, Once We Were There, which also won the inaugural Penang Book Prize 2017. She is an Honorary Fellow in Writing from the International Writing Program in Iowa City (IWP2014) and founder of the KL Writers Workshop. She has worked extensively in the arts and academia for over 20 years. Incantations/Incarcerations is her fourth collection of poems.