Description
Roadkill for Beginners is Stephanie Chan’s first collection of poetry. It’s part scrapbook of love letters to places, part field guide to the people in them. It’s a messy celebration of open mics, bonfires, and poetry stages around the world, the connections that grow up around them and the adventures that happen after. It explores desire, moving, belonging, and everything in between. It’s got apocalyptic hawker centres, magical night bus rides, and hungry turkey vultures. It’s about growing up, and not. For you, it hopes to feel like the lyrical equivalent of spooning in strange buildings then flying at full speed down a steep empty road on a bike at two in the morning.
About the Poet
Stephanie Chan (they/she), also known as Stephanie Dogfoot, is a poet, performer and independent event producer.
Stephanie is the 2010 Singapore National Slam Champion and the 2012 UK Slam Champion and have performed their work on various stages across 14 countries, including tours of Australia, North America and Germany. Stephanie is also co-editor of EXHALE: An Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices (Math Paper Press, 2021), Singapore’s second anthology of LGBTQ writing.
Passionate about building literary communities and spaces for weird art, Stephanie has been hosting and producing poetry nights in London and Singapore since 2010. They are the founder of Spoke & Bird, a monthly poetry night in Singapore which features local and international artists and is currently Singapore’s longest-running poetry open mic night. In 2024, they co-organised the Grand Poetry Tournament, Singapore’s first-ever team spoken word competition.
In 2020, Stephanie received a Digital Arts Grant from the National Arts Council of Singapore to adapt poems from the first edition of Roadkill for Beginners (Math Paper Press 2019) into a short film entitled An Intermediate Guide to Roadkill in collaboration with filmmaker Sharmeen Sifar and videographer Fadzil Noh.
They are inspired by mud, small mammals, joy and resistance.
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Praise for Roadkill for Beginners
“A wry, heartfelt collection that hides its vulnerability beneath a sardonic exterior. Whether dissecting her schooldays in Singapore or her adventures abroad, Stephanie Dogfoot remains clear-eyed and quick-witted as she lays bare the beauty and ridiculousness of human existence, sparing no one including herself. An irresistible debut.”
— Jeremy Tiang, author of State of Emergency, winner of the Singapore Literature Prize 2018
“Before reading Roadkill, my main concerns was how Chan would translate that energy she gave the audience in every spoken word performance on the page and how she would be able to curate from thousands of poems into a collection. And I wasn’t disappointed. The collection is powerful as it is intimate, and celebrates the growth of the poet, and should rightly be up there with any Künstleroman.”
—Crispin Rodrigues, Mackerel Magazine
“The energy of Roadkill for Beginners, Stephanie Chan’s debut poetry collection, arrives like a shock, like a high-speed train bound for you-don’t-know-where, rushing past your bedroom window… What brings this collection together is how her poems seem to exist on an endless spinning top, where place and time move very fast and where past and future whirl within the uncertain present.”
—Samantha Neubronner, Singapore Unbound
“Reading Stephanie Chan’s debut collection, Roadkill For Beginners, I found myself alternating between laughing and cringing at the younger self I recognised in these pages. The collection lovingly chronicles the experience of growing up, without casting inexperience as something negative. What it does, instead, is capture both the exuberance and naivete of youth.”
—Michelle Lee, QLRS
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