A review by haoyang
Professions by Amanda Chong

emotional fast-paced

3.5

Amanda writes about heartbreak, treachery, intimacy with an abundance of emotion packed into neat little verses and such poignant images as two magnetised bodies colliding, hearts being seized in a tumbling of wings, etc. The series of poems which have a particular profession as their subject-matter, like 'The Physicist' and 'The Illusionist', find unique ways of expressing the same idea of fractured relationships using language and tropes specific to each profession, thus sustaining the reader's interest in them. My personal standout poem in this collection would be 'Monsoon Girls'. It is a deeply moving elegy written in five parts which are tied together by the motif of monsoon rain as it pours and pours towards the concrete, where it is 'squandered'; the final image is most poignant: 'all that is left --/heat that dulls the wet asphalt/puddles lifting like a bruise/the memory of our faces lashed with rain/staring defiant into newborn sun/till it is mirrored in our swimming eyes.' The recovery that comes with time's inevitable passing, the pain that remains, the courage to carry on.