Book review: Ally Chua’s Acts Of Self Consumption starts small before devouring everything
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Boston-based Singaporean writer Ally Chua's poetry collection, Acts Of Self Consumption, is raw and sometimes gory.
PHOTOS: ALLY CHUA
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Acts Of Self Consumption
By Ally Chua amzn.to/46IWaRC
Poetry/Recent Work Press/Paperback/93 pages/$28.85/Amazon SG (
4 stars
In this raw and at times gory poetry collection by Boston-based Singaporean writer Ally Chua, food can be found everywhere.
Chua, in her reckoning with gender violence and worship of New York City, not only feasts on herself, but turns on others too.
In the poem The Great Banquet, she works up a voracious appetite and devours a dragon head, oxtail soup, a tiger’s paw, goat tongues and a monkey’s brain.
Just before this, she lures a sheep (or is it a human “her”?) to a cauldron to stimulate the growth of peach trees.
“If I should bite down into peach/ & find four molars/ or a clump of hair/ I’ll put them on the mantel/ along with the rest,” she says, fierce and unapologetic as a tribal witch.
It takes Chua a while to permit herself to turn into this monster, these poems coming hard and fast just after the mid-point of the collection.
But that is partially the point – self-acceptance requires courage and a certain nonchalant anger that take time to brew.
Before this, Chua’s self-flagellation is more timid.
A few early poems are simple but brilliant, such as the princess & the queen, which puts in a dialectic the motherly instincts of the queen with the transgressive pinings of the princess in just a few lines.
But for many others, reactions depend on whether the reader likes poetry that wears its heart on its sleeve.
The Neuroscience Of Pain ends with the cheesy “I still dial your number. I dial it again & again”.
Another resorts to the return of Halley’s Comet to Earth as a metaphor for love.
It is only later, after the abusive lovers, that Chua allows her voice to gradually expand to contemplate mortality (“I am a timed sequence of obsolescence”) and to adopt the potent, alliterative beats of “slake upon self/ & slam/ this seething frenzy/ & slam/ a sharp & serrated stinging/ & stop”.
The prose poem Martin Scorsese And I Get Into A Taxi marks a turning point, and Chua’s words even have the put-on insouciance of American writer Bret Easton Ellis, part of the literary Brat Pack.
In this case, this switch in tone is even more impressive as Chua has reclaimed Ellis’ numbness to talk about the misogyny of 1970s cinema, the women abused by their partners, and her inability to be out and about without constantly being asked if it is safe.
This reviewer’s favourite poem is Sun Chasing – a lovely, cosmic acceptance of the sadness that lingers and the inevitability of the sun bleeding through and bleaching everything.
Adopting this expansive view, Chua has transmuted from the individual to the collective, from the reflexive self-consumption to the more detached self consumption of the title.
By grappling with herself and others, she has found a way to deliver an annihilating knockout that makes her collection a journey from self-loathing to partial redemption.
And what is poetry if not an act of self consumption too, involving repeated self-dissection that may be destructive but probably more nourishing – for both Chua and her readers.
If you like this, read: Gaze Back: Poems by Marylyn Tan (Ethos Books, 2018, $27.04, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/3Q0yJN8
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