Cheryl Julia Lee (b. 1991)
CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
Written by Alysia Lim
Dated 21 Sep 2026
Cheryl Julia Lee is a poet and Assistant Professor in English at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Lee’s debut volume, We Were Always Eating Expired Things (Math Paper Press, 2014), originated as an undergraduate assignment for a creative writing class. The collection was subsequently published by Math Paper Press in 2014 and shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2016. Lee’s creative output is small but exquisite, comprising Expired Things and several poems written between 2015 and 2016 about Ireland, the latter in lieu of her graduate programme in Irish Writing at Trinity College, Dublin. Rich thematic resonances are present between Expired Things and Lee’s poems about Ireland: together, they explore the impossibility of making connections in a way that mourn loss and loneliness in human relationships, while celebrating the tenacity of loving nevertheless.
A slim but imaginative volume, Expired Things demonstrates a depth of poetic insight and sensitivity which is surprising considering Lee’s youth at point of publication. With the opening poem, “Take Your Shoes Off Before Stepping Inside”, the reader is drawn into the book like a visitor entering a house: well-worn metatextual cliché aside, the opening lines of the poem set the stage for the rest of Lee’s collection, which uncannily images the home as a labyrinth of secrets and memories. The reader is invited to
Walk down the streets, lined with Parisian
book carts selling secondhand books
and discover leftover sentiments and shards
of broken dreams slipped between the dog-eared
pages.(Lee, Expired Things)
Lee’s images richly evoke a once-treasured past. The books we see are “dog-eared”, suggesting they were once cherished but now put up for sale; “sentiments” – much like food in the collection, are “leftover” or stale; and whatever hopes one might have had are “broken” or crushed. Consider, too, the hushed sibilance and gently undulating rhythm in the lines “leftover sentiments and shards / of broken dreams slipped between the dog-eared / pages”, as though running one’s fingers through the fragments of memory we are about to find. Literary scholar Neil Murphy observes a “gentle, pulsating” rhythm a few lines down:
Feel how the edges
of the imported Portuguese stones that make
up the side-walk have been sanded down
by time into moons matching the slope
of a beloved’s shoulders, once lovingly inhaled(Lee, Expired Things)
In the Singapore Review of Books, Murphy notes that Lee’s “images gather in swarms, relentless, potent, but they are always clear – rare in young poets” (Murphy, “How Many Voices Are In Here?”). Indeed, much of the potency of Lee’s images lies in their ability to plumb depths of nostalgia and loneliness – the time-wornness of the stones evokes the “lovingly inhaled” shoulders of a beloved, of which the latter is now a memory.
Lee’s images of nostalgia and longing appear across poems other than those in Expired Things. In her poem, “Hold”, the reader finds oneself in the Celtic landscape of Selkie mythology and mourning:
In the places where people turn into seals
the way you and I turn a year older, I find space
for my longing.(Lee, The Tiger Moth Review)
Here, the poetic voice deftly slips from place (“where people turn into seals”) to time (“a year older”). Much like the ocean, the space the speaker finds to hold on to their mourning defies restrictions . The people who ‘turn into seals’ are an allusion to Irish mythology, in which selkies are seal-creatures which can shed their skins to become human (Rainbolt, “Selkies”). Some versions of the lore depict humans finding and hiding a selkie’s sealskin, thereby trapping them on land and forcing them into marriage. These selkies continue yearning for the ocean even when bound to a human family, and return to the sea once they regain their skin. Here, the speaker’s love is characterised by mourning or keening, an “acute speech” which expresses
the torment of a country road, a tree, evening:
the gleam of a love once lived, however brief:
the guarded canon of the heart and its necessities.(Lee, The Tiger Moth Review)
The viscerality of the wailing – indeed, the “torment” – belies the quiet, measured image of the “country road, a tree, evening”; mourning in Lee’s poetry is poignant not in loud wails per se but in silent nostalgia, “the gleam of a love once lived” and “the guarded canon of the heart.” The speaker’s longing finds its most powerful expression in the closing lines of the poem:
And the sea, the sea, the swollen, swelling sea,
I stand knee-deep in this dark blue. Look—
it holds me so well.(Lee, The Tiger Moth Review)
The repeated, sibilant sighs of the “swelling sea” convey the deep sense of mourning and longing for the speaker’s lover. The last line, “it holds me so well”, deserves some attention: the act of embrace here is ironic, as it is in the sea’s embrace of the speaker that we are reminded of their lover’s absence. To “hold”, as the poem seems to suggest through the metaphor of the sea, is not a matter of presence but loneliness and lack of connection. This shores up similarly in Lee’s other poem, “Ireland”, which describes the speaker’s attempt to move on from heartbreak:
But mostly, I found the swelling sea and the crying wind that taught me it is a costly thing to live here. Things are always pulling away, without warning, before we are prepared, more consistently than we expect.
(Lee, Icarus)
Like the acute keening we encounter in “Hold”, here in “Ireland” the reader similarly experiences the sounds of mourning through the “swelling sea” and “crying wind.” The phrase, “it is a costly thing living here,” echoes the poem’s epigraph, an allusion to the Irish writer Dermot Healy’s description of his own home in Country Sligo, which overlooks the constant erosion of the seawall by the Atlantic Ocean. According to Healy,
It is a costly thing living here to fight the erosion. The sea is constantly threatening to cut into the coastline and sweep all this away. Every year we have to haul stones up here to repair the damage and plug the holes. It’s a full-time job.
(Mahony, “West of the world”)
The fate of the bulwark in Sligo forms the backdrop of loss in “Ireland”. Like the bulwark constantly under siege by the pounding ocean, the speaker in “Ireland” observes that “things are always pulling away, without warning, before we are prepared.” The word “always” emphasises that loss is inevitable, and indeed “more consist[ent] than we expect”; to resist this erosion, to stand against Nature’s chiseling, is an act of “costly” defiance which Healy and Lee’s speaker undertakes anyway.
This “costly” defiance resonates throughout Lee’s Expired Things. In an interview with Adroit Journal, Lee shared that the collection is about “the inherent desire to reach out to people, to be reached out to, but also this feeling of never really quite touching each other” (Silbering, “Staff Spotlight”). This stubborn humanness, this persistence in reaching out despite the impossibility of grasping another, is what Lee herself has likened to the fate of Nag and Nell, characters in Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play, Endgame (1957). Famously, Nag and Nell spend their diegetic reality trapped in bins and almost, but never quite, manage to touch each other. This image informs the impossible space which Lee’s poetry traverses, of “never really quite touching” but trying anyway, which echoes throughout the sequences of relational dysfunction and loss in Expired Things.
This relational disintegration is expressed in the structural fragmentation of the collection itself: the eponymous poem “Expired Things” itself is spread out across the entire volume sectioned by Roman numerals, interspersed among other stanzaic poems. In “Expired Things”, the speaker reflects that, “We didn’t always realise [food] tasted funny… when we did, it was usually too late.” Expired food here serves as a metaphor for relational dysfunction: love grows stale without the speaker noticing, and in a terrible twist of irony, the family table becomes a site of emotional violence. In “This House Stands Divided”, the speaker notes that
sitting around the dinner
table feels like a parliamentary meeting [...]
The two sides are unevenly drawn
but clear.(Lee, Expired Things)
In her wordplay with the word “house”, Lee draws an unfortunate parallel between the empty pompousness of parliamentary procedure and the ritual of a shared meal now rendered void of intimacy. Dinner has become a vitriolic affair where “everyone’s a historian”; words are weaponised and take lethal aim, and the speaker muses:
We hold our knives and forks
with conviction, we attack as a pack.
We are usually this close to throwing chairs.(Lee, Expired Things)
The one thing which unites them is their antagonism towards one another, an image reminiscent of the domestic tragedies of Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller. A similar sense of familial dividedness, whether spoken or unspoken, pervades the collection: marital disintegration (“Why, she asks” and “On Seeing a Photograph of Your Wife”), a growing gap between parent and child (“Forehead” and “Conversations With my Daughter”), and various other shapes of love and loss pervade the collection.
Despite Lee’s candour on relational strain, Expired Things remains an unexpectedly lighthearted read at turns. With its deft use of bathos, Lee’s poetic voice refrains from taking itself too seriously even when handling matters of grief and relational disintegration. The speaker in “Chopsticks” is taught by her grandfather how to use chopsticks, only to use them eventually to retrieve his cremated remains; the girl attending a funeral in “The Buddha of Infinite Light” wonders what bra to wear and how much white gold to give. Death is juxtaposed against banal curiosity, and grief gives way to moments of dark comedy and irony.
It is also significant that, despite the dark transpositions of love and loss in Expired Things, we see, too, a poem like “How We Make Love”: here, the same desire for connection takes on a plaintive, childlike quality, where love is likened to a “preschool attempts at origami.”
… Look! I made something!
I am not quite sure what it is but look!
I made something.(Lee, Expired Things)
Love, in Lee’s poetry, is that “something”, the not-quite-nameable object of childish affection. This innocent joy gives way to the sober realisation that, as people age,
…fingers grow more adept
At taking things apart
Than putting them together… [and]
…things stop making it to the wall.(Lee, Expired Things)
The childlike wonder at love fades with time, as with the courage to keep trying. The inability to not destroy love, to not take things apart, is something that Lee explores as characteristically human, or as typical of growing into adulthood. Yet, as Lee notes in her afterword,
The poems deal with the impossibility of [connection] and celebrate our persistence in striving anyway […] I want to hold your hand although we don’t always get along. I want to hold your hand despite the calluses, scratches, and scars that get in the way. I want to hold your hand knowing I’ll have to let it go one day.
I just want to hold your hand.
(Lee, Expired Things)
Lee’s poetry exists in that space of outstretched hands, where the persistence of love trumps any discouragement, cynicism, or dysfunctionality. When affection falls apart and home is destabilised, perhaps it is as the speaker in “Expired Things” says: “We finished what we had started anyway.” The tenacity of emotional presence and love is what renders distinctive Lee’s reflections on love and loss, casting a glimmer of light on what would otherwise be bleak and desolate terrain.
Works cited
Lee, Cheryl Julia. We Were Always Eating Expired Things. Singapore: Math Paper Press, 2016.
---. “Hold.” The Tiger Moth Review, Issue 5 (02 Jan 2021). Web. 08 Sep 2026.
---. “Ireland.” Icarus, LXVI Vol.I (2015). Web. 08 Sep 2026.
Mahony, John. “Let the West of the World Go By.” The Guardian. 03 June 2000. Web. 08 Sep 2026.
Murphy, Neil. “How Many Voices Are In Here?” Singapore Review of Books. (22 Sep 2015). Web. 08 Sep 2026.
Rainbolt, Dawn. “Selkies: Irish Myths and Legends.” Wilderness Ireland. Web. 08 Sep 2026.
Silberling, Amanda. “Staff Spotlight: Cheryl Julia Lee Releases Book of Poetry.” The Adroit Journal. 02 Sep 2014. Web. 08 Sep 2026.
