Nelie Bautista, Renewal, 2025. Sing Lit Station.
V. Conclusion
Written by Ada Cheong
Dated 18 Dec 2025
Today, migrant poetry is much less ambitious than it was in its heyday, but the body of work produced across the last decade is more resonant now than ever. Amidst a rising tide of fascism and far-right xenophobia across the world in the mid-2020s (such as the “Unite the Kingdom” nationalist march in London and ICE raids in the USA), migrant poets assert through their writing that there must be alternatives to inequality, apathy, and hatred.
The irrealist and sensuous aesthetics of Singapore’s migrant poetry forms an antidote to capitalist realism. Through their verses, migrant poets articulate the lived experiences of precarity and exploitation in an improbable city. The next time you encounter a sweat-drenched worker on the MRT, remember that he could have a mother whose nose ring is as bright as the stars. When you see a construction worker napping at the void deck, remember that he could be dreaming of a wife whose hair is embroidered with fireflies, and whose tears might soak the sleeve of his shirt when he returns. Remember that there are a million men and women who labour for sons and daughters, who blow out birthday candles back home without them. In the long and lonely silence of their lives here, migrant poets are dreamers who create a better life for themselves and their loved ones. But such dreams are also a call to the difficult work of changing hearts and minds. At its best, migrant poetry was both transgressive and transformative, demanding a response from local audiences and the state. While some might view such bold writing as foolhardy in a state that actively polices and censors alternative voices, perhaps the most radical belief shared by this group of writers and dreamers is this: that poetry can change the world.
The work that migrant poetry urges us to take on, then, is to be constantly discontented with the limits imposed on these precarious workers and writers. It is to dream of a world where we can meaningfully dissolve the system of cheap labour that necessitates this distinction between locals and migrants. It is to insist that poetry is more than a luxury which an improbable city like Singapore can scarcely afford, but the medium through which we think and speak better versions of our world into being. While key migrant figures have left over the years, the words of poets often outlive their writers; this, after all, is the beauty of poetry. So let us listen. Let us dream. Let us work.
