Tissue

"How can you end/ what's beginningless?" The nature of our illusions illuminated

How do you negotiate things within yourself and the cultural influences around you? Tissue expresses all these tensions among individuals living in the world, as well as our internal struggles perfectly; as it provokes, enrages, humors and enlightens you by the clever assembly of the poems and pun-laden diction.

The writer's distrust of society in general and that of his thoughts-cum-desires are illuminated in poems whose surface simplicity belies their profundity. "Place", "Soldier, sailor, teacher, jailer", "Suit", "Oops", etc. express suspicions of media representations, capitalist ideology and how nature is thrown out of balance in today's world; whereas "You lit it yourself", "Idea", "So smart", "My head", and so on surround the futility of entirely conquering one's head and urges. Then there are those like "Mine" which neatly combines both in highly resonant language.

At the heart of it all, there is a feeling that there's no escape from these dilemmas as everything we perceive in an illusion or another, with words and thinking included. Thus poems such as "Solutionless" and "The problem with Buddhism" brilliantly illuminate the spirals we are helplessly subjected to wallow in, while forcing us to rethink our set ideals of reality. Estella Wong Dec 2012