Postscripts from a City Burning

Can someone mourn a home city while it is still standing? This second full-length collection by Sam Cheuk takes that question as its starting point, treating Hong Kong as a place that has always been passing through and is now nearing its end. Written over roughly three months, the book gathers the fallout of the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, along with the attempted coup that ultimately failed, and weaves together longing, grief, and a fragile hope of renewal.

The poems are assembled like a keepsake box. Diary-style verse sits alongside photographs, dramatic monologues, and testimony drawn from the historical record, so the reader moves between personal reflection and documentary evidence.

The mood is angry, despondent, and blunt. Cheuk presents the ruin of Hong Kong as one small instance of a wider pattern, a city burning among many as the world drifts toward increasingly authoritarian tendencies.