Lisabelle Tay is the author of Pilgrim (The Emma Press, 2021). Illustrated by Reena Makwana, the collection explores illness, motherhood, and family histories via myth and legend.
Her poetry appears in Bad Lilies, Crab Creek Review, and elsewhere. She also writes short fiction, which appears in Sine Theta Magazine, Strange Horizons, SUSPECT, and elsewhere. She lives in Singapore.
Pilgrim is an epic quest filled with atmospheric revisionings of myths, folklore, and the Bible, and flashes of domestic bliss and terror. Tay is an arresting new voice and you will find something of wonder on every page.
Christine Chia, author of Separation: a history
There is a space between the mythic and the mundane that calls to us, full of half-remembered tales, warnings, allusions. Lisabelle’s ethereal poems – less written than whispered – transport us there, allowing a ‘quickening prickle of revelation’ to build. ‘This too,’ she writes, ‘is a kind of pilgrimage’.
Theophilus Kwek, author of Moving House
RECENT WORK
IDOL
Suspect, 2023
[…] he found himself holding on to the memory, to that thread of contempt held taut between father and son, as if it were something physical he could touch and see—proof that whatever was in his father had also rooted deep within him, taking hideous shape.
[…]
Three Poems
Bad Lilies, 2022
It’s not so strange that you fell at his feet
as though dead he whom you loved the firstborn
of the dead Grief after all is a kind of failure […]
Dream of the Ploughed Field
Sine Theta, 2022
The day she sank into the ploughed
field, she thought: here is an assembly of
graves, and I am the first of these.
[…]
Lisabelle Tay 