AFTERIMAGE is proud to present the launch of A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore by Samuel Lee, returning as part of our RENDITIONS series.
First published in 2016, A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore re-emerges like an artefact pulled back into circulation—part archival curiosity, part fevered mapping of a city that refuses to stay still. In Samuel Lee’s world, supermarkets become sites of strange clarity: aisles stretch, meanings shift and the everyday begins to hum with something slightly unplaceable. Winner of the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize (Poetry in English), this is a return of a book that has only grown more layered with time.
Join us for an evening of readings and conversation as we revisit a work that moves between reference book and hallucination, documentation and drift. We’ll be thinking about how we read the ordinary, and what happens when it starts to read us back.
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ABOUT THE COLLECTION
A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore is a 19th century reference book (on philology? art history? anthropology? nobody remembers) that fell into a tropical swamp and was rescued, then lovingly restored, by a nice lady in curlers.
Caked in organic matter too dense to scrub off, the pages of Samuel Lee's debut collection reveal visions and premonitions of a city filled with characters engaged in their own private sorrows, both minute and expansive. To read him is to be lost in the aisles of millennia.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Trained in art history and literature at the National University of Singapore, Yale University and the University of Chicago, Samuel Lee (b. 1992) is a writer who lives and works in Singapore. The manuscript of his first poetry collection, A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore (2016), was selected for the inaugural edition of Manuscript Bootcamp, and was subsequently published under the Ten Year Series imprint at Math Paper Press. The collection has since been awarded the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018, making him one of the youngest winners of the award to date.
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📍Venue: Book Bar
🏢 Address: 57 Duxton Rd, Singapore 089521
🗓️ Date: Thursday, 4 June 2026
🕛 Time: 7.00 pm - 8.00 pm
🎟️ RSVP: https://afieldguide.peatix.com/