Giramondo poetry in 2023: bundle #2

A family saga narrated in multiple voices and laced with archival fragments and scholarly interjections, Chinese Fish offers an intimate glimpse into the lives of women and girls in a community that has historically been characterised as both a ‘yellow peril’ menace and an exotic ‘model minority’.

The poems in this new collection by Luke Beesley – a master of the surreal and the observational – capture the exact moment of writing: how, from it, possibilities branch out into observation, memory, word play, analogy, fantasy, other artworks and other art forms. The book is intimate, familial, often moving; it is also sparklingly clever and alert to the imaginative possibilities that can open out from the minutiae of days.

The Tour stands as a chronicle of the difficulties and triumphs of performance poetry, of which Pi.O. was one of the pioneers, long before it became the popular form it is today.