SAM Curatorial
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These poems were first read to a public audience in early October 2025. Four Singaporean poets — Stephanie Dogfoot, Daryl Li, Daryl Lim Wei Jie, and Marylyn Tan — were invited to respond to profound themes within the artwork, can haunting be another way of enduring? by Masuri Mazlan. Their verses echo the artwork's exploration of “home” as a space imbued with spectral presences and hidden aspects of reality, prompting speculations on its deeper dimensions. can haunting be another way of enduring? was one of six artworks presented as part of the exhibition, SAM Contemporaries: How To Dream Worlds.
Content advisory: The poems explore mature and sensitive themes that may not be suitable for younger readers. Reader discretion is advised.
Documentation image from poetry reading, can poetry be another way of haunting? with Masuri Mazlan.
Foreword: The Atmospheric Pressure of the Living by Masuri Mazlan
We have long understood that a text can bear the ghost of its author. But what if we considered the inverse? What if the text itself is not merely a shell for a ghost, but is, in fact, a body; a vessel of its own anatomy, its own circulatory system of affect, and its own capacity to be haunted. This anthology proposes precisely that. These samplings are not as a representation of experience, but as a site of experience itself. A body made of language, tone, cadence and rhythm, which we, as readers or listeners, temporarily inhabit. To read is to observe a haunting, and then become haunted. Their work transcends the autobiographical to achieve what we might term “autopoetic presence”.
DON’T ASK WHY I ONLY REMEMBER THE BAD PARTS is not about Stephanie Dogfoot’s escape from a house where they perfected “the art of subterfuge” for 38 years. The poem is the very psychological architecture of that house, and we feel the doorframes press against our postural anxiety as we move through its lines. We do not learn about their longing for a “butch haircut”; we inhabit the silent, muscular memory of a throat that has forgotten how to form words to ask for it. We occupy their devastating aporia, the grammatical void where the vocabulary should be. The texts become more of a spatial entity, it is a condition of being: one is a silent self-censorship and somatic vigilance that transfers to the readers.
Furthermore, these textual bodies are subject to the same forces of inheritance and deformation as our own. Daryl Li’s deformations does not describe grief; it performs the physiological process of being reshaped by it. His entry is a sensitive instrument registering the “slightly different hum” within the “slightly different cavity” of a home after loss. When he watches as “the portraits pinch and twist,” we are not witnessing an external event but feeling our own viscera tighten. The text, as a body, registers the pressure of its history, and its form becomes the scar tissue of that encounter. His central breathtaking question– “what are ghosts but gentle shapes but forms of love?”– diagnoses of a condition where affection and ache is inseparable. The plea of, “May you haunt me longer,” is the body of the poem consenting to its own beautiful, yet painful reshaping.
Marylyn Tan’s safe as houses, a tour de force on codependence as a supernatural infestation, is not a metaphor constructed but a venereal language we contract. Her verses on being an “Inhospitality Agent” do not simply tell the story; they transmit a fraught condition. As we read, the poem’s “malevolent entities” and its absurd, desperate tools become spectral presences in our own psyches. She then chronicles a shared space inhabited by the unseen “middle managers”, suggesting that the most profound haunting is not of the people, but of the very propositions that bind them. The ghost lives in the with, the for and the in. The woet’s role is not to speak, but to listen, to become a medium for the frequencies that travel through the relational conduits. The text becomes a transcript of the static, a record of the whispers from wires of human connection. The poem culminates in a startling inversion of authorship at the final lines, “I want to belong, but not to you”. They function not as a resolution she achieves, but as an exorcism the text performs on us.
Finally, this collection culminates in a body that consumes its own inheritance to achieve a state of radical, terrifying becoming. Daryl Lim Wei Jie’s Hunting the hantu: a fever dream offers a body in a plight of violent, metabolic riot. This poem is not a storytelling, but a digestive tract, processing the indigestible “viscera of mammals” and the “putrefaction of mid-day contentment” of history into a new form of identity. It starts by sloughing off the “molten gold” of false identity and ends with the alchemical command to “Eat the plate/ Become the Sun”. This is the ultimate expression of the textual body: it devours the very vessel of trauma, the lineage, the culture, the “twelve bags full of dumb, sharp rocks”. It transforms into a self-generated source of light and heat. While the body beams brightly, it simultaneously self-immolates.
This collection is a gathering of voices within the commissioned work, can haunting be another way of enduring?. It is an exhibition of textual bodies, each one a living, breathing, and haunted entity. To engage with them is to consent to a temporary possession, to allow your consciousness to be displaced. They demand your embodiment. They offer no easy meanings, only the profound and unsettling truth: the most powerful literature is not something to be understood, but something we host. Scroll down the webpage, and prepare to enter a dwelling place.
DON’T ASK WHY I ONLY REMEMBER THE BAD PARTS by Stephanie Dogfoot
deformations by Daryl Li
Hunting the hantu: a fever dream by Daryl Lim
safe as houses by Marylyn Tan
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Masuri Mazlan (b. 1990) is an artist and cultural worker whose practice spans sculpture, found objects and photography. His mixed-media installations translate innate desires of intimacy, longing and belonging into uncanny but familiar vignettes of domestic and everyday life. Transforming industrial materials into amorphous forms, Masuri moves between the boundaries of hardness and softness, control and vulnerability, personal memory and collective experience—creating environments that operate as quiet sites of reckoning with inherited trauma and the ambiguities of identity.
Masuri graduated with a BA in Fine Art (First Class Honours) from LASALLE College of the Arts, accredited by Goldsmiths, University of London. He was a recipient of the Goh Chok Tong Youth Promise Scholarship (2016), 38th International Takifuji Art Award (2017), Winston Oh Travelogue Research Award (2018) and the LASALLE Award for Academic Excellence (2019).
ABOUT THE POETS
Stephanie Dogfoot is a spoken word poet. They are the author of the collection Roadkill for Beginners (Math Paper Press, 2019) and a co-editor of EXHALE: An Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices (Math Paper Press, 2021). Passionate about building community and creating spaces for weird art, they also organise and host cabarets, comedy nights and poetry nights. Stephanie is the founder of Spoke and Bird, a monthly event which features local and international artists and which is currently Singapore’s longest-running poetry open mic. They are inspired by joy, resistance, mud and large mammals.
Daryl Li is a writer of literary fiction and nonfiction. He is the author of two collections of essays—The Inventors (Rosetta Cultures, 2023) and Tenderly, Tenderly (Atomic Bohemian, 2024)—as well as a collection of short stories—Minor Illusions (Querencia Press, 2025). He was a resident writer in the 2024 International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. His work has been awarded the Golden Point Award, longlisted for the Australian Book Review Calibre Essay Prize and Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, and also a finalist in the Georgia Review Prose Prize. Daryl Lim Wei Jie is a poet, translator and editor from Singapore. His latest collection, Anything but Human, was a finalist for the Singapore Literature Prize. He conceptualised two anthologies: Food Republic: A Singapore Literary Banquet, which received a Special Award at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards; and The Second Link, a collection of Singapore and Malaysian writing about the unique relationship between the two countries, shortlisted for Best Literary Work at the Singapore Book Awards. In 2023, he was awarded the Young Artist Award, Singapore’s highest honour for young art practitioners. He is currently working on the video gaming anthology, Free to Play. Marylyn Tan is a large-beasted, supple, queer, female Chinese Singaporean writer-artist whose proclivities are promiscuous and appetites indiscriminate. Her work aims to subvert, revert and pervert, and works to disrespect respectability and reclaim power. Her first child, GAZE BACK, is the lesbo trans-genre grimoire you never knew you needed, and made her the first woman poet (woet) to clinch the Singapore Literature Prize.
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