K.C Philips

Public Service Announcement: Project E

My childhood was rife with multiple movie collections—a Bruce Willis collection, a Harry Potter collection and a Winnie The Pooh collection being the most notable. Winnie The Pooh is the culprit, so to speak, in this regard.

Christopher Robin and Winnie The Pooh probably had the most adorable friendship ever, not to forget Eeyore, Tigger and Piglet making up one the most untouchable squads ever. In one of the movies, there was this particular adventure where I heard the word, ‘eureka’ for the first time in my life, uttered by Christopher Robin. Unfortunately, that movie was subtitled in Mandarin. As a result, I did not know how spell eureka for about seven years, if I am not mistaken, until I saw it in a Dan Brown novel (my money is on The Lost Symbol). Having a smartphone at the time with Internet access would have come in handy as I would have simply vocalised it to the Google Assistant the way I heard it. But there was no Google Assistant in 2007. And I was about six or seven years old.

Fast forward twelve years and a couple of months. Velvetrip, my second poetry anthology, had just been released. Possible titles to my third anthology and what its central theme would be did not wait long to start bouncing around my head. Having randomly stumbled upon/reunited with the word eureka on Twitter, I could not think of anything else to title my fifth project (sixth, had I already completed my ongoing third novel, The Curse Of Asara Lubat). The central theme of closure seemed like a natural follow-up to Velvetrip’s central theme of discovery. After all, with discovery comes closure. Things were gradually shaping up for my third poetry anthology even as the highly anticipated 2020 kicked off in full swing. Until the events that defined 2020 happened.

Given the light-hearted context in which he said the word, Christopher Robin would probably gasp in horror at the literary body of work which the word inspired.

Like everyone else, I soaked in the many curveballs of 2020. I literally wrote off the year 2020 in its second quarter and adopted the mantra, ‘2021, we move again’. It was disheartening. There were memes, challenges, Instagram Live sessions and countless other distractions, but the uncertainty of everything was disheartening. Inasmuch as the outbreak of the Coronavirus disease was first reported on December 31, 2019, the alteration of the world order in March 2020 still felt so sudden. What was coming next? How was the world going to come out from all of it?

The events that defined 2020 fundamentally altered the nature and direction of the anthology, which formally entered into development in May 2020. Somewhere along the line, I decided to work with the premise of a revered building which blew up all of a sudden, as well as the efforts of the grieving locals to find an explanation. The sudden explosion is a metaphor for the defining events of 2020 and the resulting search for closure seeks to mirror everyone’s efforts in recovering and trying to adapt to the new normal. While this basic premise is certainly subject to multiple interpretations, it is the first thing I would like my readers to have in mind when reading the anthology.

In a nutshell, as you would have figured out already, my third poetry anthology is titled Eureka. It is a Greek expression traditionally attributed to Archimedes the mathematician, loosely translating to, ‘I have found it!’. Eureka features twenty-one (21) poems centred on the primary themes of closure, grief and survivor’s guilt. It is slated for release on Friday, December 24, 2021 at 18:00 GMT+1. It would be available for purchase on PabPub, Okadabooks and (hopefully) Amazon. The first three poems would also be available for free on Wattpad.

If you are a lover of poetry, you should get in. If you know a lover of poetry, tell them to get in. It’s Eureka season.