Interview with Suyin Du Bois

Suyin Du Bois is a poet of mixed Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian heritage, living in London with her South African husband. Her poems have been published in Propel, Iamb, Stanzas, Bi+ Lines: An Anthology of Contemporary Bi+ Poets (Fourteen Publishing, 2023) and Malaysian Places and Spaces (Maya Press, 2024), amongst others. She is a member of the Southbank Centre’s New Poets Collective 2024/25. When not obsessing over word choice, Suyin spends her time building a profit-with-purpose start-up that seeks to ensure 24/7 access to nutritious, affordable food for NHS hospital staff. Eating Air is her debut pamphlet.

Interviewed by Laura Sygrove

LS: Eating Air opens with "Ode to Kaya," a poem that moves between childhood and adulthood. Why did this feel like the right poem to begin the collection?

SDB: "Ode to Kaya" was the first poem I wrote where food took such a central role, and it really opened up something in me. Suddenly I was thinking of all the different ways food could help me explore different areas of emotional interest. Since this poem acted as a gateway for me, I hoped it might do the same for my reader. Beyond that, it seeded some key context and themes for the collection which I hoped would help get the reader quickly into this world: the idea of multiple homes at distance from one another, the connective power of food, as well as tensions around identity.

LS: In poems such as this one, there is a sense that food and memory change when carried across borders. How has living in London affected your relationship to the places and traditions you write about?

SDB: Certainly, I think distance romanticises the worlds that you are apart from, and that we are more at risk of taking for granted that to which we have daily access. In my writing I am often trying to capture elements of the world that are not my day-to-day, to make my memories and momentary impressions tangible. Regarding living in London specifically, I love how culturally mixed London feels to me, how it feels like a place where I can be all the parts of myself. I do think it is a very positive influence on my writing in this sense. 

LS: Your preface connects food, poetry, and a sense of home, while many poems explore questions of identity and belonging. How has writing poetry helped you navigate the cultures, languages, and places that have shaped you? 

SDB: What a beautiful question. I love the reflective nature of writing poetry. It encourages me to ask questions of myself, to think about what I’m interested in communicating and why. There are parts of my cultural upbringing that are already bedded in, others I have consciously sought out for myself, and others I am only learning about now. I am still being shaped. It’s all a work in progress, and I think poetry has a supportive, parallel role to play in that. Beyond this, I love how poetry connects me to other people. I have some readers who have similar upbringings and background to me and others who have completely different ones. Hearing both these sets of readers highlight something I wrote that resonates with them is beautiful and fills me with a new sense of belonging. I honestly can’t get enough of it. 

LS: Much of the collection is written in prose poetry. What drew you to this form, and how do you decide when a poem needs a different structure?

SDB: Pretty much every poem for me starts as a brief note about a specific idea or memory. My Notes app is full of these! When I have time to sit down and write, I take one of these ideas and free-write to try to get down as much core and tangential detail as I can. From this free-write, I pick out the elements that I think make a poem, and then start writing toward that in a much more structured fashion. Usually this is where I start to introduce form. I'm firstly interested in making line breaks and stanzas work with my own cadence and pacing: I will always read my poems out loud throughout the editing process (a big reason why I struggle to edit in public!). Beyond that, I look at the overall shape and feel of the poem, and try to use the form to introduce some element of surprise or highlight particular words or ideas. 

For the slash poems in the collection, I still see these as line-broken poems rather than prose poems. In "Cut Scenes" this felt right at first due to the fragmentary nature of retelling memories that aren't mine, where I am inserting myself. Additionally, there was something about the poem being sliced up like steak that I rather liked! In "Every trip to Brussels must include a Sunday," again these felt like fragments of varying interconnectivity all stuck together in one big way, so the close separateness of the slash felt right to me here as well.

LS: In poems such as "Auntie Pixi’s Aga Agak," recipes become a way of preserving memory. What interested you about those moments where cultural inheritance feels both intimate and incomplete? 

SDB: While I very much embrace my two heritages, I feel a certain level of disconnectedness also for two key reasons (and perhaps others too). Firstly, I never knew any of my grandparents, they all passed away before I was born. Secondly, I can't speak any of my heritage languages fluently. As I've gotten older these things have bothered me more and I've mourned that feeling of distance, even in the context of love, with older family members who have now passed. This is a continuing area of interest for me.

LS: "Chinese New Year at Sara’s" explores the tension between inheriting traditions and reshaping them. Why was that an important theme for you to write about? 

SDB: I suspect that I or the things that I do will never be whole or authentic enough for some people, and so I'm conscious that I need to claim and celebrate these differences for myself. Knowing this and doing it, however, are not the same thing! Having said that, I actually didn’t realise that’s where this poem was going to go when I started to write it. It took me to quite a bold, declarative place all by itself. 

LS: The title Eating Air comes from Hokkien and Malay expressions connected to food, wellbeing, and travel. When did you realise it was the right title for the collection, and what does the phrase mean to you now?

SDB: I had these phrases "chiak hong" and "makan angin" noted down as a seed idea for a poem for a long time, and planned to explore how these idioms for travelling translate to "eating air," but I just never ended up writing into the idea. When I was getting my sample of ten poems together in response to The Emma Press open call for submissions, I needed to give the collection a working title in the proposal. I was struggling to find something within the sequence of poems itself and this jumped out at me when I turned to my Notes app for inspiration. It just seemed to fit perfectly with how the poems invite the reader to travel across the world with them. I also love how the title is intriguing in English as an unusual turn of phrase. I’ve had several people ask me the story behind it. Luckily, I was able to include an explanation in the preface, which unravels this for non-Malaysians.

LS: Food carries memory, grief, family history, identity, and belonging throughout the pamphlet. What does food allow you to explore in poetry that other subjects might not?

SDB: Food gives me a really concrete, sensory way into so many different subjects. I can start off free-writing about the physical experience of eating and end up somewhere completely different, abstract or even undefined, which I might otherwise struggle to get to or to articulate without the more tangible language of food. 

It felt really generative for me as well, having this theme of food to play with. I was constantly thinking of new meaningful food moments, and noting them all down. I was really conscious that I didn’t want to be writing the same poem over and over again though, so I kept pushing myself to make sure each poem took me in a new direction. 

About the interviewer
Laura Sygrove is a graduate of the MA Creative Writing programme at the University of Leicester. She is an advance reader at DartFrog Books and writes for The Publishing Post. You can read some of her poems here, here and here. You can read a review by Laura of Eating Air by Suyin Du Bois on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Review by Paul Taylor-McCartney of "The Language of Now" by Anne Caldwell

Anne Caldwell’s The Language of Now is a collection of prose poems that moves quietly but insistently through memory, landscape and the fragile textures of everyday life. Rooted in a northern sense of place, the book also engages with illness, ecological unease and the emotional afterlife of recent years.

Caldwell has become one of the most assured contemporary practitioners of the prose poem, and this form suits her especially well. These pieces are compact but spacious, lyrical without becoming vague. They unfold in paragraphs that seem at first conversational, then deepen into something more meditative. Her work returns repeatedly to bogs, backstreets, moorland, weather and overlooked urban edges, yet these are never simply settings. They are charged spaces where memory, vulnerability and the more-than-human world meet.

Caldwell’s restraint is one of the collection’s greatest strengths. She lets emotion gather around an image until it becomes quietly affecting. In "Wasp’s Nest," the speaker listens for "the ragged edges of our lives," a phrase that captures much of the collection’s mood: vulnerability, endurance and the sense that contemporary life often feels slightly frayed. In "Widdop Gate, High Summer," the moorland is described as "egg-shell delicate," and later as "a map of the whole world in miniature." These small phrases open outward with surprising force.

Some of the most moving poems connect strongly with questions of class, culture and language. "Boundary Lane, 1974" in particular stirs that recognition. Its backward glance towards a childhood street, and towards the social world carried in place and speech, suggests how deeply early surroundings shape us. Caldwell’s attention to ordinary language and remembered environments prompts a nostalgic return to childhood: to voices, habits and local textures that once seemed fixed. What these poems understand so well is that growing into the present often means letting go of much that was once familiar in order to make way for the new. 

The title poem suggests another dimension of the collection’s thinking. Caldwell writes that the language of the present moment "now drifts away like a driftwood smile … or a Spring moon waxing and waning." These images capture the book’s underlying concern with impermanence: the sense that language, memory and even identity shift continually with time.

Elsewhere the emotional register deepens into something more intimate. In "Lost Daughter," the line "I wrote a letter: Dearest Daughter, how I longed for you. To hold your butter-coloured toes in my hands" carries a tenderness that is both personal and universal. The image is simple, yet it holds an entire emotional landscape within it. 

What emerges from The Language of Now is a poetics of attention. These prose poems do not seek dramatic revelation. Instead they offer something quieter and more enduring: a way of seeing the ordinary world with renewed sensitivity. In a literary culture that often rewards urgency and noise, Caldwell’s work reminds us of the value of patience, listening and careful noticing. This is a subtle, moving collection that stays with the reader long after the final page, and invites return, offering a brief but beautifully crafted space for quiet reflection.

About the reviewer
Paul Taylor-McCartney is a writer, post-doctoral researcher and lecturer. His interests include speculative fiction, queer studies, children’s fiction and initial teacher education. His poetry, short fiction and academic articles have appeared in print and electronic form. He recently published his debut children’s novel, Sisters of the Pentacle (2022), and his work as commissioning editor resulted in two titles winning prestigious regional awards. His first non-fiction title, Cornwall Uncharted: Mapping Cornwall’s Queer History of Concealment, Culture and Creativity, is due to be published by The History Press (June 2026).

You can read more about The Language of Now by Anne Caldwell on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Nina Walker of "sum of her PARTS" by Laura Besley

In sum of her PARTS, Laura Besley provides us with a beautiful series of briefly illuminated windows - vignettes that offer glimpses into the moments of intimacy that make up a life. Besley writes tiny, furious fiction concerning an increasingly fractured world. Each story acts as part mirror, part shard, as cutting as it is revealing. This sentiment is perhaps embodied best by "shattered," in which a self-hatred over physical appearance culminates in a speaker smashing a mirror and stating, "with the shards of glass / I give myself a new face." 

Besley gives a new face, not just to the nameless speaker of "shattered," but also to the presumed limitation of flash fiction. Her creative approach to the visual presentation of flash fiction gives the collection a strong visual identity, a new face. Utilising poetic lineation techniques, Besley’s work shatters and reforms our presumptions about the form.

The collection is carefully threaded together by a series of intimacies, perhaps most centrally the intimacy one must have with oneself. In the refined and precise prose that is present across all four of her published works, Besley presents the reader with moments of physicality that ripple out beyond the pieces' short word counts. Often, the body of the speaker is positioned as an object of discussion, like a museum exhibit - an object transformed by a thread of absurdism that contrasts with the collection's physicality. In one story, the speaker is transformed into a trumpet, in another, a character grows an extra arm to hide their face. Bodies in Besley’s work are central yet malleable. They are expressed through a series of familiar quirks and fault lines, "thick middles," "haggard faces," and "bruises" that can become beautiful or bizarre at a moment’s notice. When reading Besley’s work, one is left discovering, through her typical sharp and wise immediacy, a new strangeness within oneself. 

In one of my favourite stories from the collection, "fractured," Besley writes:

          the doctor says "We’re going to need to take a
             consent form." I sign. "If you could just remove your
                bruises, multiple, along the collar bone and across the patient’s back
                   home, he might be awake, be wondering why I’m not
                      there is a bed ready for you now." I don’t

Here, the body, while still central, is cut in two by the story's perspectives. The lineation is cleverly used to construct the patchwork of the patient as observer and subject. "Patient’s back" flows cleanly into "back home," as if the thoughts of the patient effectively interrupt the clinical observation. Time is clipped and stitched as the request to "remove your bruises" merges observable reality and individual desire for escape. A clashing moment of exterior reality and interior doubt culminates in the piece's final unfinished fragment, "I don’t." The final line, when read within the context of a domestic abuse victim refusing the (albeit limited) protection of the hospital, is haunting. The lack of a concluding full stop implicates all the possible moments this patient may inhabit after this one, leaving the ending of the piece jagged and frayed.

In just thirty-four pages, Besley draws us into a network of bodies, thoughts, and conversations, always, as flash necessitates, with scant context. Yet the brief nature of each piece illuminates just how interconnected we all are, each jagged edge implicating a matching edge that may yet lie beside it. The sum of the collection's parts is a moving and sharply observed portrayal of the complexities of embodied life, where one must place gentle intimacies right alongside painful metamorphosis and absurd possibilities. 

About the reviewer
Nina Walker is a first year PhD student at the University of Leicester studying the impact of digital technology on the contemporary American novel. She also co-runs the Leicester based creative writing group Amateur Hour. She enjoys writing poetry, reading speculative fiction, and pub quizzes. 

Review by Beth Gaylard of "Creative Writing Student Showcase" at Literary Leicester Festival, 2022

 

I attended lots of events that ran as part of the recent Literary Leicester Festival, but one of the most memorable for me was the showcase for Creative Writing students. Usually, as students listening to each others’ work, we are in a forum where commentary and critique are required. It’s quite rare to get a chance to listen and absorb peers’ work, without that requirement. For recently enrolled MA, PhD and BA students, working on our research through the pandemic, there hasn’t been the opportunity for any networking offline for ages, so there was a bit of a ‘school’s out’ atmosphere.

Ten writers, poets, storytellers and novelists chose extracts or short works not necessarily connected with their current projects and read them aloud to an audience of peers and their guests. Some were published, some not. The main objective was to choose something you liked that you’d written yourself, and read it aloud to a roomful of near strangers. While some readers confessed to feeling nervous, the event wasn’t billed as a performance, and most if not all of us read off the page. There was a feeling that it was a positive opportunity. Hopefully the listeners enjoyed it as much as the readers; they seemed to, judging by the applause and the buzz of conversation afterwards.

There is a simple pleasure in sharing work with an attentive, mutually supportive audience, and this is enhanced in the experience of hearing your own words aloud. You get that ‘leap off the page,’ that is so empowering when you’ve spent a lot of working time in a quiet place, on your own, perhaps feeling quite unsure that what you’ve done has any potential, let alone any significance.  

So … Please can we do it again!

About the reviewer

Beth Gaylard is a writer and PhD Creative Writing student at Leicester University. Published works include Firebrands, an SF novel and various poems. Her work in progress is a piece of rural dystopia. Her home is in Leicestershire.

You can read more about the Creative Writing Student Showcase 2022 on Creative Writing at Leicester here.