i might have new text out this year! math paper press going under led to all of my individual titles  and the majority of my anthos going out of print, less whatever stock is still in bookstores and in my personal stash.

but there have been a few positive developments -  (1) i am in discussions with a publisher about bringing out a New and Selected Works this year! if it goes through, it will gather 44 poems selected from my first five-ish collections (sonnets from the singlish, making love with scrabble tiles, sonnets from the singlish UPSIZE EDITION, footnotes on falling, farquhar, translations to the tanglish), and 44 new pieces, which include some selections of previously unpublished formal and spoken word pieces, and a huge chunk of creative translations that make up my phd journey of the last six years. pretty excited about letting this see the light of day! (2) i intend to top up my personal stock of translations to the tanglish with a small self-published print run, so that will continue to be findable in stores (!); (3) my PhD is wrapping up (fingers crossed), and as part of my submission and examination in April, I'll be printing a very very limited edition run of my creative folio to pass to my examiners and fellow PRS journeyers - maybe 20 copies. there's a fair bit of overlap with the "New" bit of my "New and Selected", but not entirely - there are some pieces I don't intend to publish anywhere else, ever...

but yeah - it's pretty exciting to be working with designers and pdfs again, getting to know the layout of a book. have been quiet for a couple of years, but finally coming back into the print biz.

sadly, a whole bunch of my stuff is out of print. thankfully, a few steady booksellers are still keeping the flame alive. 

you can pop down to book bar at 57 duxton road, where you can buy copies of sonnets from the singlish, footnotes on falling, and translations to the tanglish.

epigram's online bookshop still holds copies of the twin cities anthology.

ethos books' online store also has copies of unfree verse.

momo books, a secondhand online bookshop has copies of translations to the tanglish, sonnets from the singlish, call and response 1, call and response 2, and footnotes on falling.

finally, seabreeze bookshop, with physical store at 37 tannery lane #06-09, and online store here, will be bringing on copies of sonnets, footnotes, and tanglish - will post links when that's up. 

Dual gig update:

- Will be speaking at Head2Head, a SingPoWriMo showcase with outgoing SLS head honcho Charlene Shepherdson, tomorrow at 7pm on Zoom 

Event deets here.

- Will be doing my first live gig in like... forever, at Spoke & Bird #52, with Irie Aman and Mok Zining, at UltraSuperNew Gallery. Thu 28 Apr!

For students of SingPoWriMo, if there is such a thing - Ann Ang, Cheryl Julia Lee and me cobbled together an article on this oft-participated-in but little-written-about phenomenon for TEXT journal's special issue 64: Poetry Now. 

Check it out here.

Always an honor to be invited to the Singapore Writers Festival, and this year I'll be doing a Pop Song Pract Crit alongside Karisa Poedjirahardjo on Tue 9 Nov from 9-10pm. Looking forward to deconstructing the sociolinguistics and prosody of the satirical paean, 这个那个 (aka "The Cai Fan Song") by Annette Lee and Benjamin Kheng. 

This is probably my first pract crit since my A-levels so it's likely going to be a shitshow. Check it out with a Festival Pass!

I should really be promoting some of the new books I've published, but I do want to mention that I've finally set up a proper Instagram account at @joshuaipwriter where I will actually be talking about my books and such, with like uh pictures and things. and my older @joshuaipman IG has been privated and reserved for a flood of baby pictures. 

I went on a massive purging spree and reduced 1k+ followers to 200ish over the weekend, so um if you were unceremoniously purged, um, please follow @joshuaipwriter instead, you may not have access to my flood of baby pictures, but are only entitled to my flood of poetry spam. 

posting about a trifecta of thingies that launched over the weekend, all helpfully archived on Facebook Live eternally for your consumption!

​- Launch of "A Luxury", the compendium reprint of A Luxury We Cannot Afford (an anthology about The Man, published in 2014, just before his death) and A Luxury We Must Afford (an anthology about life after The Man, published in 2015, with the open call period between SG50 celebrations and the elections). ALWCA has been out of print for a while after a few reprints and ALWMA just finished its first run, so its great to see this extremely value-for-money collection hitting the streets very soon.

- Launch of HK-SG Travel Bubble, this year's poetry.sg digital feature that popped up after a random facebook conversation with Eddie Tay. 8 pairs of writers swopped words and pictures about each of their favorite places in HK and SG - have a look at the site itself and indulge a little piece of digital travel!

- Launch of Call and Response 2, a Singapore migrant anthology - where 36 pairs of writers with at least a fleeting affiliation with migration and Singaporeanity exchange words across the page - in microfiction, short stories, poetry and more. the editors talked at length about their hopes, not just for the collection, but for migrant writing in Singapore - this was probably the deepest-digging panel of them all. you can get the book here from BooksActually's online store as always.

check them out slowly on your own time!

perhaps this blog should just be a series of links to my facebook feed, lol.

but here is one i do want to sit on, and come back to for a while - a list of the good people who have interned for me, and the good work they have done.

i really don't post here as much as i should. so this happened around 6 months ago - i redeveloped some of the scattered lines written for farquhar: the musical (in hiatus, renaming to 'found: the musical', reorienting topic to nonio / sophia, and waiting for bicentennial fatigue to recede... long story) into a short ebook, which ethos released for free thanks to the generosity of <redacted redacted>. 

you can get your (free!) copy here alongside several other free ebooks by sing lit writers on adjacent topics, including overlapping takes on 1819 by neil humphreys and colin goh.

​some news snippets:

Straits Times
"...check out Joshua Ip's Farquhar, a snarkily contemporary free verse retelling his life in various voices"

Straits Times, different article, not entirely accurate...
"...It aims to give Singapore's first British Resident the Hamilton treatment, after Lin-Manuel Miranda's smash Broadway hit about American founding father Alexander Hamilton."

I can't believe we are 6 manuscript bootcamps in - 3 for prose, 3 for poetry. I kind of veered off the last few - I definitely didn't read anything from the previous prose camp, and I only barely skimmed the last two poetry camps - but this time I found space to read the prose submissions cover to cover, and enjoyed myself thoroughly. My ability in prose is highly dubious so I'm happy here just to be a fly on the wall and listen to Bernice and Inez take the new batch through - fly-on-the-wall fringe benefits.