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Book of the Week

We Speak of Flowers
Poetry

We Speak of Flowers by Eileen Chong

In Li-Young Lee’s ‘Furious Versions’, a poem reckoning with his family’s exile, there is a question: ‘How then, may I / speak of flowers / here, where / a world of forms convulses.’ Eileen Chong draws these lines into her sixth book of poetry as an epigraph, reorienting them to find her title, expanding Lee’s first-person singular into the plural ‘we’, its question into statement. This drawing-into-connection and shifting is central to Chong’s poetics, established in her striking début collection, Burning Rice (2011), which includes an image linking women, flowers, and power. ‘The Flower of Forgetting’ ends: ‘Women can be strong. Flowers too.’

MSO Brahms - March 2025
2025 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize
MSO Metropolis - March 2025
MSO Metropolis - March 2025

From the Archive

September 1997, no. 194

Landprints: Reflections on place and landscape by George Seddon

George Seddon is well-known as an environmentalist and academic. Western Australian readers will remember in particular his Sense of Place (1972). He is currently an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Studies in Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia and Emeritus Professor in Environmental Science at the University of Melbourne.

From the Archive

December 2006–January 2007, no. 287

Raising a smile

Humour sells, and it is no coincidence that the best-selling authors in children’s fiction know how to tell a funny story. It can be pure escapism of the silliest sort or the kind of humour that helps us to cope with life’s disappointments, hardships and embarrassments. Most childhoods contain plenty of all three and thus provide rich material for writers, and none has pushed the boundaries further than Morris Gleitzman. Walking a fine line between what is funny and what is painful, he has successfully employed humour to explore such subjects as euthanasia, homosexuality, cancer and birth control, and the result has been books that have made thousands of readers laugh and cry, sometimes simultaneously. But the proliferation of recent titles featuring worms, toads and nostrils as protagonists has left me unmoved, and I feel lukewarm at best about those children overboard, underground or hiding from Nazis. Often the humour has seemed forced and contrived.

From the Archive

July 1997, no. 192

Kinsella's Hallmarks

Fremantle Arts Centre Press published its first collection of John Kinsella’s poetry in 1989, only eight years ago.