Kameron Lai



Kameron Lai Reviews Suneeta Peres da Costa and Šime Knežević

While I am hesitant to pathologise the diasporic experience (it is indeed a site of joy!), the effects of displacement often feel proximate to malady. I am always cautious to frame diaspora in such ways – it would not be genuine of me to pretend as if it were always a joyful experience, or something that I have never felt ashamed about. And there is guilt in that shame. Suneeta Peres da Costa’s The Prodigal (2024) and Šime Knežević’s In Your Dreams (2025) stoke the fever in my heart that aches and involuntarily turns to ugly feelings, pleated over and over as I make sense of my place in relation to contemporary Australia and my ancestral homelands.

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The Ugly Poem: Ouyang Yu’s Terminally Poetic and the Counter-Aesthetics of the Multilingual

Beauty has a quality about it that pretends to neutrality and universality, despite being steeped in asymmetrical constructions of aesthetic judgement. Of course, this is no surprise in a hierarchical world; ‘Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.’

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