Crispin Rodrigues (b. 1988)

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

Written by Ho Kin Yunn
Dated 21 Aug 2026

In James Joyce’s posthumously published Stephen Hero (1944), Stephen Dedalus arrives at the conclusion that claritas—clarity or radiance—is inseparable from quidditas, the “whatness” of a thing. Things become luminous, Stephen suggests, once their essential nature is recognised. Crispin Rodrigues’ poetry often operates in the inverse; rather than attaining clarity through illumination, his poems linger within unresolved questions of mixed ethnic inheritance. An early and committed participant of Singapore Poetry Writing Month, Rodrigues has long been a vital proponent of Singaporean poetry and literature; on top of his own collections, he has also edited Crazy Little Pyromaniacs (2020), a collection of poems from poets under the age of 35. Rodrigues’ works cover the personal, socio-political, and a myriad of interests from the perspective of a poet-educator. His speakers are often sardonically self-aware and at odds with certain aspects of their lived realities. Ethnic identity, national belonging, family history: these emerge not as stable truths but nebulous concepts that language alone cannot tackle. Indeed, as practically all criticism of Rodrigues’ work has touched on, the relationship between race and identity remains one of the primary recurring themes in his work, sustained and refined through his collections. Of Chinese and Eurasian descent, Rodrigues’ work regularly traces the duality and often overlooked minutiae of living across (and between) multiple communities and categorisations. In Pantomime’s (2018) “Curry Devil”, a play on the Eurasian dish devil’s curry, there is a nigh-academic vigour in the unpacking of the narrator’s roots, paired with chasers of poetic interrogation; the racial components comprising the mélange of his identity are listed almost as ingredients:

...pre-packaged history that
cares not for our diversity: Portuguese,
English, Spanish, Dutch, German, Jewish,
Malay, Indian, Chinese, (both Straits and 
mainland)—instead only a Catholic identity

(“Curry Devil”)

This suggests an excessive reduction of one’s identity based on religious affiliation alone. Further down the collection in “Waters”, Rodrigues observes the fluidity of identity politics through the lens of language:

Kristang a distant tongue, 
neither my father’s nor mother’s tongue, 
Latin tongue, we will taste it but not use it.
The Eurasian days are a distant memory.

(“Waters”)

Here, Rodrigues contemplates (rather yearningly) the role language has in one’s ethnicity, and subsequently questions what role one’s ethnicity has in one’s identity. Common perceptions of Eurasians in Singapore are typically linked to Catholicism, their primary religious affiliation. Rodrigues seeks to reject such pigeonholing. It is also important to note the endangered status of Kristang in Singapore today, which underpins the sense of loss throughout “Waters” while also paving way for the more anticipatory switch in tone in the poem’s final stanza (“Will I craft new stories, or redraft stories anew?”). 

Amidst this, there is some sense of sardonic pandering to communal solidarities, with the poem “Waters” beginning with such local (though more Eurasian-centric) expressions as “Katong Enclaves? / Afternoon tea on the SRC lawns?”, which seems to simultaneously include and exclude, as these locales are typically accessed by Eurasians of higher-income backgrounds. Such references function paradoxically: gestures of local solidarity that somehow also expose the exclusions embedded within classed and racialised spaces. “Waters” ultimately becomes emblematic of Pantomime itself, a collection exposing the pitfalls of self-imposed categorisations, and one deeply invested in how different expressions of meaning can mirror and mimic the same lived reality (in sometimes uncanny fashion). Take, for example, this stanza:

Grandma washes my batik shirt
complains how easy the colour runs,
her Malay is muffled by off-whistles,
bursts of air in between black teeth,
stained by a life of chewing sireh.

(“She Tried To Be A Peranakan”)

The easily washed-off colours on a batik shirt and the more stubborn betel-chewing stains convey a delicate dichotomy that exists in conserving one’s heritage; the ease of erosion is followed by a reminder that there are other more ingrained (and sometimes unexpected) markers that offer proof of one’s culture. Rodrigues’ poetry confronts these notions of identity and carefully considers their value, in both retention and dissolution.

If Pantomime interrogates inherited identity, The Nomad Principle (2019) expands that interrogation toward aspects of migration, faith, and ancestral memory. Poems such as “Stained Glass Window” and “A Ghazal of Milk” both showcase similar examples of racialised aggression under religious contexts, with the narrator in both poems being asked to “go home” to “where you came from” (“A Ghazal of Milk”). Crispin’s utilisation of the ghazal to address himself directly (“Lactose intolerant, Crispin, / you inherit the guilt of whiteness.”) adds a layer of tension to the poem, as the speaker considers an inherited complicity with European colonialism alongside the lactose intolerance typically associated with Chinese ancestry. 

In any case, xenophobia is tied to some level of religiosity here; that the poems round up the first section of the book, “Fear of Waiting”, potentially alludes to some apprehension towards the act of “waiting” in Catholicism, in which one can expect to find solace and revelation. In a modern, fast-paced society like Singapore’s, such an act of abeyance can be seen as counter-cultural. In the case of Nomad, the poet’s apprehension towards such a pious expectation ties in with the narrator’s Eurasian (others) identity and the religion typically prescribed to his supposed “whiteness”. In “Stained Glass Window”, the narrator, likely somewhere outside of Singapore, contends with this dissonance further by questioning his own place in the church (“With my goings, I am a visitor here”), and is confronted with more racial antagonising, being told “ching chong go home, go home and eat / your snakes” (“Stained Glass Window”). Such theological threads intertwining with racial stereotypes pervade Nomad, layering Catholic iconography alongside diasporic consciousness.

Such textures are not limited to the thematic, as shown through Rodrigues’ deft use of textural sensation to convey childhood reminiscence. In “Hand-Me-Downs”, the narrator vividly describes a:

photo of grandpa 
his face dour as dusk, the thickness of his eyebrows
the size of fish fingers, my dad’s favourite.

This is then followed by barbed, visceral observations:

But the missal which rested on my head before 
birth is etched in umbilical scralls. It is my grandpa’s
keeper, like his bass thundering an imagined mass.

(“Hand-Me-Downs”)

These are both sudden and characteristic of the poet’s hypnic style. With hand-me-downs there is always an element of second-hand intimacy that, in the case of this poem, is further complicated by the scorn-tinged wistfulness in the narrator’s expressions such as “Maybe diabetes is a hand-me-down too.” Rodrigues showcases skill and an earned familiarity in this style, which he puts across effectively in this poem and many others like it throughout his bibliography. 

Bird motifs are one such example of the poet’s varied interests, with several appearing in his third offering, How Now Blown Crow (2021). In this collection, Rodrigues weaves bird imagery and natural phenomena into his observations on romantic behaviour. As Jonathan Chan posits for QLRS (2022), Rodrigues’ crow potentially alludes to Ted Hughes’ interpretation, a “divine, austere figure that lingered over both creation and carrion.” In the context of this collection, such a lingering figure serves as both observer and puncturer of flawed idealisms, as Rodrigues lays bare the wasteland formed amidst the degradations of divorce. In the poem “Nevermore”, the characteristic refrain from Poe’s “The Raven” is used to reinforce the Crow’s hawthorne effect as mythic presence. Also referenced is Paul Gauguin’s similarly inspired painting Nevermore, which brings in an element of grief (particularly for the loss of a child) into the poem’s already bleak atmosphere (“nevermore sepia shade monologues”, “nevermore pauses that punish time / like a recalcitrant child”).

In “There is Room”, the nest is both physical and emotionally shared space, and jadedness is observed through the lens of frigid mortality:

You mottled bird of grey plumage, a nest
with room for one. I have lived in your loose leaves—
a refugee, though I own the whole tree.

I do not confuse age with wounds.

When you take off your clothes to let me see
your cankers and sores, I find your teardrop penis cute—
a sprout drooping from the folds of mottled earth.

(“There is Room”)

Beyond the sense of unflinching blasé, the poem contains incisive observations on the protraction of love’s various elements amidst relational decay. The style is effectively sprinkled throughout the poet’s body of work and is, most often, aptly used for the chosen subject matter. For instance, in “All things remaining equal”, Rodrigues poeticizes how a well-worn path of intimacy can lead to melancholy: “When we lie / in the same bed, I follow your contours, / leading into a buried era of woes” (“All things remaining equal”). This also has the effect of dulling other less evocative passages by comparison (consider the pallid-handed morality of the allegorical “Cuckoo”, appearing earlier in the same collection). Other poems in the collection use other nature metaphors to tackle the sense of deterioration and aridity which manifests during marital breakdown, such as “Desertification”, which appears almost as a prelude to the book’s three sections, metaphorically encompassing the barren retrospection that often comes after separation:

And every being
was happy. Until the earth

wanted further reach. 
Rift valleys gave themselves

new meanings. The creatures felt
only tremors, nothing alarming,

until cracks were observed,
water levels fell. Days 

grey warmer, and nights
blistering cold.

(“Desertification”)

Such a discovery is only made bleak by its post-event futility. Choosing to begin the collection with “Desertification” could be Rodrigues’ way of signaling the inevitability of things to come, but having the subtitle “(After Pangaea)” also suggests the advent of a fractured era that requires more intentional acts of connection.

The third of Rodrigues’ collections following Pantomime and The Nomad Principle, How Now Blown Crow’s focused themes centring divorce and past love make for a more resolute collection, despite its increased length of 121 pages compared to his shorter, more loosely-themed collections (Pantomime stands at 52 pages, Nomad at 62, and dragon.paper.wind at 78). Yet if read at a different time of the day, one can just as easily quip that this running thread is a loose contextualization that barely holds the mish-mash of subject matter displayed. In Chan’s review of the collection (Chan, “Union and Separation, and the Crow’s Bumpy Flight,” QLRS), he laments that the collection falters from the poet’s “investment in symbols that cannot bear the weight of the significance they are meant to hold, and the sometimes discernible rush to conclude a poem.”

Rodrigues’ fourth and most recent collection is dragon.paper.wind (2024). The collection’s blurb states that it “explores mixed race, bilingualism and the complexities of living in a society still entrapped within the CMIO model of race.” It is also the poet’s most intimate collection yet. It includes a photo of his parents, unpretentiously explores interactions with relatives (“meeting my perth rodrigues cousin for the first time”), and brings readers more introspection on his roots and his lived experiences, with both his Kristang heritage and Chinese ancestral history showcased in bolder turns of phrases. Take “poem for my mother”, an ode to the poet’s mother that is unfazed by poetic convention nor unbothered by the potential mawkishness of odes:

& you my mother, who never inherited
the family shipping business, who buried your father
at 25, seldom said much in the way of firsts,

who was the first of your generation to choose
an outsider who spoke no cantonese, skin
the colour of a dock worker, whose husband

shared some familiarity with your smoking
father their tastes in nicotine & whiskey.
both, at first, were cold & then learnt to warm up

because of your hand wrapped around theirs.

(“poem for my mother”)

Here, the narrator lists how his mother has effectively upended generational patterns while also paying homage to the sum and substances of his forebears before her. The poem reminds readers of Rodrigues’ reverence toward his ancestry, despite past, current, and potentially future tribulations resulting from such a heritage. Its candidness also directly translates to its gravitas and reaffirms the poet’s lyrical sincerity when it comes to memory and lived experience.

Indeed, dragon.paper.wind sees Rodrigues reopening the conversation on racial identity with composure and nuance. There is light-hearted commentary (“my race wants me to have a body like joseph schooling") mixed in with more overt discomforts (“every question I’ve ever received by taxi drivers”), yet neither reside in an emotionally singular plane; in the former, the narrator, after extolling differences in athleticism and physique, laments:

…joseph, i must  
be good at something. there is at least one 
eurasian boy looking at me & i don’t want 
to disappoint my nephew.

(“my race wants me to have a body like joseph schooling”)

As with many of his other poems, wetness is employed here by Rodrigues to hide deeper feelings of unease and vulnerability. In the poem “every question I’ve ever received by taxi drivers”, the speaker lists seemingly harmless questions fielded by taxi drivers, though some, whether intentional or not, carry a more derisive undertone than others (“how come you singaporean?”; “how come you don’t wanna go back?”; “when you going home?”), exemplifying the poet’s usage of poetic inquiry to convey such weighty matters as race and being othered. 

This collection also suggests that the poet’s work is strongest when he extracts from the ethereality of a thing, and boldly homes in on it. Take the unfettered verses of “big boi”:

when others command you to hold your tongue
tell them in your body lies a menagerie
of creatures who have roosted in a nest of kind milk.
scale & fang & tooth & claw have found
shelter.

(“big boi”)

Or consider the contrast between dragon.paper.wind.’s seven-line “advice from the old country” and its six-poem counterpart in How Now Blown Crow. The latter’s convoluted weaving of various conversations and one-off quips offering marital advice might take some work to consolidate, but in the former, Rodrigues’s unflinchingly Singlish tips and forms of guidance that constitute the poem (“speak until learn. / make mistake then slap. pain pain only little bit.”) shows the Singaporean naturalisation of his family, even as they reference the ‘old country’, perhaps Portugal or even Malaya. It is not outlandish to assume that this also represents the poet’s effort to revise past work, reflecting growth and maturity through a greater economy of language. 

*

In Rodrigues’ poetry, illuminating certain examples of racialised tensions, such as the ignorance displayed in “every question I’ve ever received by taxi drivers”, brings about discomfort not only to the typically unaffected or the wilfully unaware, but to the poet himself. It is through such lived experiences that Rodrigues’ work is able to shed light on such complex issues as race. As his work demonstrates, to be Eurasian is to have one’s sense of belonging perpetually challenged, with reminders of the plurality of one’s identity coming externally and from within; it is a persistent state of displacement and therefore is itself a place with a certain degree of permanence. 

Discussing The Nomad Principle, Daryl Lim exalts the poet’s strength in navigating the “sense of being between things” that accompanies the Eurasian identity, stating that “there is poetry here backed up with painful and revelatory personal experience” (Lim, “Spoilt for Choice: Inconsistency makes sophomore collection a bumpy read,” QLRS). While much of Rodrigues’ poetry has indeed tackled these facets of his life, the conclusion to the third section of Nomad offers another framework. The penultimate poem, “If you are reading this somewhere else” is dedicated to the poet’s contemporaries, listed by name in the poem’s subtitle, “(For Jocelyn, Pamela, Dustin, Gwyneth, Al, Min, Shuang, Xiao Ting, Qamar, Natalie, Elizabeth, Paul, Kendrick, Jerome)”, and is as much an ode as it is a rallying cry for this community of poets:

...You, for whom this island
is no longer yours, create with me afresh
another of our making, of silken strands and bullet casings, of late-night calls and last-minute emails.
Most importantly, keep your bottles after you drink them,
so that our words may meet on the evening tide.

(“If you are reading this somewhere else”)

Titled “Safety in Numbers”, the section, under the context of the collection (Nomad), can be seen as referring to racial/ethnic majorities, yet the section (and the book’s) two concluding poems suggests that Rodrigues is also considering his writer-poet identity, potentially holding it in greater esteem here than his other identifiers. The section’s final poem, “Fire Proof”, opens with a quote about poetry from fellow Singaporean author Ang Shuang, and continues with several poetic forms, elements, and motifs (“With precipitation poetry becomes runoff”, “How can I write sestina in my mood, or a ghazal / for the gravestone of my relatives?”). In doing so, Rodrigues celebrates the necessity and inherent pervasiveness of poetry and all its forms in the day-to-day, constituting the “proof” of existence of his poetic identity. After all, the poet’s plurality of interests both mainstream and obscure are more than evident through the myriad references he alludes to, which should remind readers and critics that there are several depths to the poet’s work beyond the inquiry into racial identity. It is almost as though these more identity-themed poems represent the constant reminders - whether involuntary or not - of his heritage, amidst his other interests in mythologies, ornithology, and the poetic inquiry (and exaltation) of religious themes. In so doing, Rodrigues’ visceral and unflinching poetics reminds us that it is impossible to detach one’s interests or doings from aspects of one’s identity.

Poetry has no obligation to clarify, but Rodrigues’ poetry embodies the lived experience in such a way that one cannot help but witness in sufficient glory the muddied profundities of his background. There is undeniable appeal to such an intimate poetic showing, and one can only look forward to the poet’s next ruminative collection.

Works cited

Chan, Jonathan. “Union and Separation, and the Crow’s Bumpy Flight.” Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Vol. 21. No. 2. (2 Apr 2022). Web. Accessed 1 May 2026.

Joyce, James. Stephen Hero. London: Jonathan Cape, 1944.

Lim Wei Jie Daryl. “Spoilt for Choice: Inconsistency makes sophomore collection a bumpy read.” Quaterly Literary Review Singapore, Vol. 19. No. 2. (2 Apr 2020). Web. Accessed 1 May 2026.

Rodrigues, Crispin. Ed. Crazy Little Pyromaniacs. Singapore: Math Paper Press, 2020.  

Rodrigues, Crispin. dragon.paper.wind. (龙卷风). Singapore: Ethos Books, 2024.

—. How Now Blown Crow. Singapore: Math Paper Press, 2021.

—. The Nomad Principle. Singapore: Math Paper Press, 2019.

—. Pantomime. Singapore: Math Paper Press, 2018.

Teo, Dawn. “Race and Religion Issues Addressed by Crispin Rodrigues in Pantomime.” Popspoken, 9 Nov 2018. Web. Accessed 1 May 2026.

 

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