This is a selected works from Alvin Pang's previous five collections. Wry and shrewd, the poems promote intelligence and sensitivity. They mock, celebrate and unsettle, are generous and beautiful, full of paradoxes, logic and illogicalica, and are at once recognizably national and international in reach.

When the Barbarians Arrive comprises poems from three published collections - Testing the Silence (1997), City of Rain (2003) and What Gives Us Our Names (2011) - together with a body of new and uncollected poems by one of Singapore's most exciting and visible poets of the post-1965 generation. Ranging from unsentimental love poems to sharply satirical writing and audacious medleys, here are poems wry and shrewd, intelligent and sensitive, generous and playful, yet full of paradox; poems that pry, celebrate and unsettle. This is Alvin Pang's first full-length UK publication. [Pang's] poetry adds a rich and complex presence to the critical mass of urban literature now fully emergent from Singapore. His poems, at once recognizably national and international in reach, offer a fresh edgy energy to this tradition. Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize 1992