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Joss: A History
Grace Yee’s follow-up to her triple award-winning poetry collection Chinese Fish.
In the White Hills Cemetery in Bendigo the remains of more than a thousand ‘chinamen’ lie interred, many in unmarked graves. Most were sojourners, who hailed from the Canton region in south China, and found themselves unable to return to their homeland. Joss: A History is inspired by the lived experiences of these early settlers, and their compatriots and descendants across Victoria and New South Wales, and Aotearoa New Zealand. The poems pay tribute to the author’s ancestors, illuminating how they survived – and thrived – amid longstanding colonialist stories that have exoticised and diminished Chinese communities in white settler nations around the Pacific Rim since the gold rushes of the nineteenth century. Refracted through a twenty-first century lens, Joss is grounded in the conviction that the past is not past, that historical events reverberate insistently in the present.
Technically innovative and complex, Yee’s work is grounded in extensive archival research and contemporary experience. Time is elastic, layered, as Chinese and colonialist perspectives jostle, as the past leaks into the present. Yee is a poet of conviction, a thought-provoking and distinctive voice in Australasian literature.
Alison Wong (Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate)
Yee’s deft control of irony and collapsing of time burns up all the damaging cultural clichés that white Australia still perpetuates, while lighting up multiple perspectives from across the centuries: ‘you poke the embers with a joss stick,’ Yee writes, ‘and you try to read them.’
Toby Fitch
Part poetry, part prose poetry, part found poetry, part story and history, or part social commentary, this is a short collection of timepieces…designed to capture a cacophony of lost voices, scattered over a sea of Chinese cemeteries, and symbolised by a single self-acclamation: ‘I’m a can’t’.Ouyang Yu
Grace Yee is a singular voice rising from the ashes of our knotted Chinese Australian past. A poet-historian showing us a way, she excavates archival voices to bring clarity to the present. I am forever changed by her radical multicultural vision for this country.Sophie Loy-Wilson
