When the Barbarians Arrive

This is a new and selected works, with some poems taken from Alvin Pang's previous three collections. The selection ranges from unsentimental love poems to sharply satirical writing; here are poems that are wry and shrewd, intelligent and sensitive. They mock, celebrate and unsettle, are generous and beautiful, full of paradoxes, logic and illogicality, and are at once recognizably national and international in reach, offering a fresh edgy energy to the wave of urban poetry emerging from Singapore.