Poetry review: Madeleine Lee’s observations of Raffles Hotel and Ashley Koh’s skewering of teenage politics

How To Build A Lux Hotel

By Madeleine Lee
Poetry/firstfruits publications/Paperback/106 pages/$35/Raffles Boutique (

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Claw Machine

By Ashley Koh
Poetry/Wonder to Wander/Paperback/150 pages/Borrow it from the National Library (

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After American travel writer Pico Iyer and New Zealand author Vicki Virtue, third time is the charm for Raffles Hotel’s writer’s residency programme as it welcomes its first Singaporean.

Madeleine Lee, 61, stayed at the hotel over several periods between October 2022 and May 2023, and completed her poetry collection How To Build A Lux Hotel in July.

The veteran author of 11 volumes of English poetry settles on the quiet and intimate in this project: Casual encounters and bite-size histories of the hotel are interspersed with flitting interactions with staff and guests, many pointedly named.

Though some may be disappointed with the lack of salacious details – and Raffles Hotel has borne witness to many private scandals – the sanitised, pristine product is befitting of the practised 136-year-old institution.

In some ways, How To Build A Lux Hotel even trumps its predecessors: This Could Be Home: Raffles Hotel And The City Of Tomorrow (2019) – Iyer’s magisterial reflections on the hotel’s history and the effect the site has had on writers – and Virtue’s murder mystery The Raffles Affair – A Victoria West Mystery (2021).

Poetry is more digestible and appropriate for souvenir buying and gifting.

Lee’s poems are atmospheric enough for visitors to hearken back to their time dining at the Tiffin Room or admiring the Victorian fountain in the palm garden, and could be read even in situ, short as they are.

She adds some incisive observations to boot. The British cast-iron fountain has been painted over in French blue, just like how “the british accent/swapped for french/the toy soldiers/swapped for croissants” as management of the hotel has been turned over to French group Accor.

Another post-colonial dig at the homogenising glamour of the hotel: “they come in all manner of whites/…the linen the suits the panamas/the heat the smiles the turban.”

Lee makes the case that the hotel has stayed relevant with its philosophy of “in with the old in with the new”. Old brass lamps in rooms are switched on with a tablet and old-style ceiling fans co-exist with air-conditioning.

The hotel’s Writers Bar has rolled out five handcrafted cocktails specially inspired by Lee’s poems. They, as well as the book, are available at $35 each.

Ashley Koh’s Claw Machine is a rawer and more angsty offering.

The 18-year-old is the daughter of renowned Singaporean Mandopop lyricist Xiaohan.

She published her first novel Rosemary And The Wood Hut Fairies when she was 11, later translating this herself into a Chinese version.

Claw Machine is born of poems she since put on her Instagram page and which have found a following among her schoolmates and members of the public.

The 99 poems here (not 100 “because we are always imperfect”) are split into broad themes of, among others, the rat race of school, teenage politics, boys and people’s tendency to self-sabotage. They are written with a caustic wit.

They often turn on a fun twist in expectations, usually by invoking Gen Z slang.

One titled “orbiting” uses the moon’s circling of Earth to comment on the similarly named practice of showing vague interest in someone by engaging with him or her on social media (“all he does is turn counterclockwise/around her blue earth planet,/it was almost like he’d planned it”).

The titular Claw Machine is the way school feels to Koh – “i lie there/praying to the three prongs above/for someone/anyone to pick me”.

Though one wishes Koh would be more experimental with form and break out of rhyming quatrains, Claw Machine makes for good punchline poetry and should transport the more uncynical back to a time when accidentally hitting Play on a crush’s Spotify playlist was the stuff of high tragedy.