Hed gotten the idea from a book, not unlike the one you last read and loved, whoselurid covers you have already forgotten. For a canvas, he used not his own skin but hisvery life, spending his days as if he were made up of the most telling bits of otherpeople. To do this, he learned to watch quietly and look deeply, past the busy surfacesuntil he could discern the colours beneath, the ones that did not change. One by onehe would name them as he wove them into his heart in the deep of night. He touchedyou once, borrowing pieces of your story in passing. They are here still, in case youwish to look.

Alvin Pang, PhD is an award-winning poet, writer, editor, anthologist, translator and mentor whose broad creative practice spans three decades of literary activity in Singapore and elsewhere. His writings have been translated into more than twenty languages worldwide, including Swedish, Macedonian, Croatian, Chinese and French. Featured in the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English and the Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, he is author of the bestselling What Gives Us Our Names (2011), What Happened (Poems 1997-2017), and more recent works such as Uninterrupted time (2019) and Det som ger oss vra namn (2022). A 2022 Civitella Ranieri Fellow, Dublin Literary Award judge, he has taught at Yale-NUS College, serves on the boards of several literary institutions, and is an honorary Adjunct Professor of RMIT University.