We Speak of Flowers - by Eileen Chong (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

We Speak of Flowers, Eileen Chong's sixth collection, is a wondrous extended elegy dedicated to her ancestors. Its 101 pieces are a spacious, meditative record of an attempt to make sense of grief in the face of great pain. Chong's interweaving of memory, history and possibility showcases her mastery of poetic form and craft, all the while displaying her signature light touch in exploring the pathos of things. This is poetry that thrums with feeling, of deep connections to place and ancestral roots, and of the search for meaning in a broken world.

Review Quotes

'Grief shatters our speech and our self. Eileen Chong honours this, yet also elevates the fragment into a capacious poetry, where each shard is whole in itself, connected to others and to the world. We Speak of Flowers is revelatory in its associative clarities, profound in its images and silences, raw, tender and devastating. I relished this astonishing and nourishing book, and will return to it again and again.' Andy Jackson

'We Speak of Flowers is proof positive of Eileen Chong's distinction and musicality as a poet. As a series of fragments built to be shuffled around by the reader, she offers us a welcome chance to sing alongside her in a chorus of sensation and memory.' Alison Whittaker

'In Eileen Chong's kaleidoscopic work of extended elegy, the poet illuminates a spectrum of grief borne in the wake of many losses: of family, of futures and pasts, of language and inheritance. Reconstituted anew with each encounter, We Speak of Flowers crosses and recrosses the precarious spaces of and between memory and dream, history and myth - testing, with restless invention, the limits of "what the page will hold".' Bella Li

About the Author

Eileen Chong is an Australian poet who was born in Singapore of Hakka, Hokkien and Peranakan descent. She is the author of ten books published in Australia and the United States. Major prizes her work has been shortlisted for include the NSW Premier's Literary Award, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award, and twice for the Prime Minister's Literary Award. Her debut book, Burning Rice, is the first poetry collection by an Asian Australian to be studied as part of the NSW HSC English syllabus. Her most recent collection with UQP, A Thousand Crimson Blooms, was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. She lives and works on the unceded land of the Gadigal of the Eora Nation. eileenchong.com.au