Founding Editor: Jason Erik Lundberg
Many thanks to LONTAR for providing a review copy of this
issue.
LONTAR is a biannual literary journal focusing on speculative writing from Southeast Asia. This is the first time I have reviewed an issue of a
literary journal, but it won't be the last. I have separated my review into genre-based sections, listing the pieces with the author's name and country.
Poetry
“The Woman in the Coffee Shop” and “The New World” by
Christina Sng (Singapore)
“Moulding” by Sokunthary Svay (Cambodia/USA)
“Tooth” by Daryl WJ Lim (Singapore)
“Apocalypse” by Tania De Rozario (Singapore)
“The Interview” by Lee Jing-Jing (Singapore/Netherlands)
“A Marriage of Hybrids” and “Lambana” by Joel Donato Jacob
(Philippines)
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of most of the poems in
this volume. I’m not really a fan of poetry in general, and the amount of
speculative poetry I have read is minuscule (mostly confined to Edgar Allen Poe, unfortunately!), so I’m not the best person to
judge these pieces. That being said, my favorites were the last two poems by Joel
Donato Jacob, which are written on themes taken from Filipino mythology: the
Tikbalang, a creature that abducts and forcibly marries young women; and the
Lambana, the Filipino equivalent of Will o’ the Wisps.
