Elsewhere, the Cosmos Cracks: Poems

A finalist for the 2024 Gaudy Boy Book Prize, Chrystal Ho delivers a debut that is both urgent and intimate. Ho takes the temperature of today’s climate by casting her observant eye across art history, domestic interiors, the documented life of Agnes Joaquim, and the invisible cracks in our everyday environment.

Elsewhere, the Cosmos Cracks is a poetry collection that asks, amidst the climate crisis, how one continues to find wonder in the everyday. 

Beginning from the confines of a HDB estate, the poems present a way of walking through Singapore’s landscape, to find moments of reconnection across time. In pieces that reconsider public housing as a garden, revisit the well-worn story of a national flower, and return to familiar rituals and language as inherited wisdom, the collection posits that some of our answers might just be awaiting us in plain sight—so long as we learn how to look.