SINGAPORE - It was not in dusty tomes that British poet Momtaza Mehri first encountered poetry, but through spoken-word cassette tapes that her father, a Somali immigrant, would play in the car.

Today, she composes poems in bursts on a phone app while taking the bus or train, then painstakingly edits them. "Poetry is all about the editing," she says. "A poem is made in the edit, in my opinion."