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Temporary Press publishes books around art and design with an interest in ideas and practices exploring alternative or incidental notions of design. With limited resources, the press relies on economical design and production methods, often with a black-only Risograph and simple tools. Based in Singapore since 2018, Temporary Press is run by gideon-jamie and distributed internationally by Idea Books (ideabooks.nl). Contact us via email (temporarypress@gideon-jamie.com) or IG (@temporarypress

From A (Undesirable) Diary

$25.00

by Jason Wee, 2023

co-published with Dakota Books

edition of 500
144 pages
115mm × 180mm,

ISBN 978-981-18-9108-3

Jason Wee’s fourth poetry collection is an imaginative reconstruction of a history of permission and prohibition in the Malayan Peninsula. Through excerpts from a fictive publisher’s diary, Wee traces encounters and negotiations with the censor and the censored, beginning just before the implementation of the laws against ‘undesirable publications’. The central section carries us into the difficulties of making literature in the present, each diary entry a record of single painful incidents, each a study of our acts of reading both the printed word and the world. The devastating final section acknowledges the history of books and bookmaking as a history of foreclosures, while staying alert to art’s possibilities.