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• Australian Poetry
• Eileen Chong
• poetry

Review of burning rice by Eileen Chong

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Amber Beilharz

May 15, 2012

burning rice by eileen chong Australian Poetry 2012 burning rice is part of the 2012 New Voices series and the debut collection from Eileen Chong. The publication is a sleek, pocket-size 40 pages. Here lies great poetry, tight phrasing and an innate way of telling stories. The title evokes a nostalgic sense of home and food; the notion of absence circulates the poems, reminiscent of scents and fragrances. What strikes me first is Chong’s ability to immerse the reader in two landscapes: the old and the present and this imagery is unswerving, charming and utterly absorbing. Think the sacredness of bathhouses, mooncakes and photo albums braided with beautiful descriptions of quiet and reflected moments. In any other context, these glimpses could have been mundane but here they’re given breath. The poetry feels like walking through a family home, all those details, ornaments with stories behind them. There’s a familiarity in reading these poems, despite the cultural difference. In ‘Before Dawn’, Chong textually dedicates the poem to her grandfather with wonderful use of language, shifting to present from passing: ‘Father of my father, I was not quite seven / when you died. We drove in darkness / before dawn broke’. In ‘My Hakka Grandmother’ there’s the lines ‘run / through the fields, feet unbound /’ and ‘rice husks, like your dark hair’ evocative of childhood and that memory of food and love combined. This poem describes well the borders of otherness, specifically in ‘I wonder where our bloodline begins. / We are guest people /’. In ‘Kelong’ Chong reminiscences 1980 via the use of photography, the imagery is haunting in ‘He holds the ghost / of a fishing line but has caught nothing’ and ‘my grandmother steams / the orange fish in a wok, when you grandfather picks out / its eyes with his chopsticks’. Like Chong, I can also taste ‘the sweet flesh’ and the poem conjures up a cinematic photograph that I hold in my mind. In ‘Elementary Chinese’ Chong cleverly interprets Chinese characters literally by paring the radicals of the words armour and bird to equal duck: ‘a bird wearing armour is a duck’. On surface level the poem reads like a definitive list of obscure images or a riddle, the way you interpret the poem is essentially a linguistic puzzle. These lines are definitely playful! The line, ‘The sea: a mother wearing a hat / by the waves’ conjures up the frill on the sunhat and the sound of the ocean, accompanied by a sense of unease or uncertainty. Halfway through the poems become smaller in size, but this spontaneous brevity gives enough space to let the other images stir and settle. ‘Clockwork’ is striking in its imagery:

and count. Weigh the shadow of the egg yolk. The sonographer measures your minute spine and hands us a print of a ghost-speck labelled ‘baby’ as I peel on my clothes.

What I love so much about these lines is the precision and care, echoing that of the sonographer’s but also the way Chong manipulates expression. ‘ghost-speck’ is haunting and the reveal of ‘baby’ brings us into realisation of new life. I am particularly taken by ‘Lu Xun, your hands’ in which Chong describes Lu Xun, Mao’s favoured poet of the 20th century. Lu Xun is really a seminal writer in Chinese Literature, whose work calls up sensations of being homesick and this is echoed strongly in Chong’s collection. This poem takes a romantic and admired tone, especially within ‘your hands / are clasped behind your back, / across the black silk / of your scholars dress’ and ‘Your thoughts / unfold before me, beginning / at the moss-green rocks. They linger’. The line breaks are most beautiful and suggest pausing to reflect and meditate on and within Lu Xun’s influence. Eileen Chong figures out her heritage via food and ritual. This is a wonderful, rendered first collection which is warm, playful and reminiscent of the things we love and the landscapes in which we do so. You can purchase burning rice here.

The Writer Behind The Curtain

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Sharona

May 14, 2012

Voiceworks talked to three of the writers featured in Voiceworks #88: Translate. FICTION Oliver Mol Cunt Angel Page 14 VW: Did anything in particular inspire this piece? OM: When I was young, maybe nine, I had my first kiss with this girl named Melanie to Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Time After Time’. Not a proper kiss, just on the lips. Then she moved away and I moved away and all this time passed and one day I said what is her name maybe I can find her on Facebook and then I did find her on Facebook and she had moved to Armidale and was pregnant and was part of this group "I like blokes who drive utes" and "yewww utes" or something. Then I thought about contacting her. I guess this was my inner monologue or my way of dealing with it. The story, of course, is a tragedy.

• media
• speech
• The Underage
• youth

The Under Age Launch Speech

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Sharona

Apr 30, 2012

So we're a bit late to the party, but at the launch of The Underage, Michael Nguyen-Huynh and Bethan Williamson made a speech. That speech is below. Enjoy!

Hello.

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Sharona

Apr 30, 2012

A quick introduction: I'm Sharona, the Online Communications Intern for 2012. I used to write for The Underage, but they kicked me out because I wasn't cool enough because I'm not underage anymore. I am solely responsible for turning the Express Media Tumblr into the home of a kitten-obsessed, lonely 18 year old girl's Tumblr. You're welcome. It's nice to meet you.

The Importance of Giving: Jaime Garcia on Ruth Lilly

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Amber Beilharz

Apr 24, 2012

The story I've assembled in my head is incomplete. The characters are there: heiress to a billion dollar fortune, a poetry magazine, the grave of Poe. The plot, though, remains sporadic, riddled with recluse and depression. From a news headline three years ago I first read: Poetry Magazine to receive 100 million dollar grant. The occasion on which this grant was offered was the death of the sole heiress to a pharmaceutical fortune. Little has been written about this woman. The Ruth Lilly we know about: an art and poetry lover, a rabid reader, a woman whose generosity has been unmatched in the literary world, has scarcely made headlines before or since her death and contribution.

Voiceworks #88 ‘Translate LAUNCH

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Joe

Mar 27, 2012

Join us for the Melbourne launch of Voiceworks #88 'Translate! It'll be great party times for readers, writers and editors involved with Voiceworks. And you can get a copy of the magazine before anyone else! It's also going to be the last issue edited by Johannes Jakob, so this is his goodbye party too. He'd really, really like you to be there. Also, say hello to the new editor!

The story of a child soldier

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Johannes Jakob

Mar 08, 2012

This nonfiction piece originally appeared in Voiceworks 85 Other in July 2011.

By Alexandra Fisher (21) – a young Australian writer whose background has fostered a love of different cultures and a desire to understand and report on issues that bring new insight to Australians.

Scovia sits on her top bunk. Her legs stretch across the bed and her hands cup over her knees. She looks vulnerable and I feel uneasy. ‘Just pretend the camera isn’t here and it’s just you and me,’ I tell her.

• edcommitorial
• listening
• Writing

Play Edcommitorial, Listen

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Johannes Jakob

Dec 20, 2011

As promised in the magazine, you can now listen to the edcommitorial from Play, which is confusingly but sensibly itself called Listen. It's both written and read by Rosanna Stevens.

Winning Poem: ARTillery Poetry Slam

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Joe

Dec 19, 2011

Read more about the Artillery Poetry Slam here. By Kirsti Whalen.

These are the things that I don’t know.

I don’t know how to do calculus.

Or long division.

Or short division.

Who Do You Think You Are Post 4

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Joe

Dec 06, 2011

“Just Who Do You Think You Are”

During 2011, six diverse schools began working together on a very exciting year 10 student writing project. Collaborating online, the teacher-librarians, English teachers and students shared their personal writing and gained a broad understanding of the diversity of culture and experience across Victoria.

WHO AM I?

By Josh Hanegbi

From: Bialik College

I pace up and down an empty hall, doors on both sides. Each door looks the same but I know that only one will take me forward.

My sharp footsteps slowly turn into the crunch of sand under my feet. The waves breaking on the shore fill the air, timeless and endless.