Lachlan Brown

A hoarding Chinese grandmother fills her home with objects, unable to distinguish between the value of things. Meanwhile, her Asian-Australian grandson travels to China for the first time, wary of the revelations that the trip might offer, as he tries to make sense of his own Chinese and Anglo-Australian background. In Guangzhou, Kaiping, Shanghai, and Beijing, amidst the incessant construction and consumption of twenty-first-century China, a shadowy heritage reveals and withholds itself, while the suburbs he knows from back home are threaded into the cities he visits, forming an intricately braided Chinese-Australian inheritance.

Limited Cities is a collection of poems which searches for and finds grace in outlying and disadvantaged parts of the city that are often derided or ignored. The primary setting is Sydney’s south-western suburbs, with their housing estates and shopping malls and highways, places featured in the media for crime, social tension and corruption. Elsewhere in the collection, these suburban scenes are set against their European counterparts, with rhapsodies on the Parisian banlieues during Advent and Lent, and list-poems set on the streets of Barcelona. Lachlan Brown’s poetry draws a self-aware and precarious authenticity from these contested landscapes, using a variety of forms which allows his poems to be personal, political and revelatory by turns.