CONTRIBUTORS

Gavin Yuan Gao

Gavin Yuan Gao was born in Beijing and moved to Australia at fourteen. They are a poet and translator based in Brisbane. Their first book, At the Altar of Touch (UQP, 2022), won the 2023 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry and the 2023 Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, New England Review, Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, Meanjin, Griffith Review and elsewhere.

‘I want to stand at the end of a poem as the humans stand beneath the sky’: Gavin Yuan Gao in conversation with Thomas Enriquez

Poetry often asks the reader to navigate an incommensurable distance: the breath-length attentiveness of a line, an image set aglow, even an ending as it unfolds – to bend towards the silences thereafter, to sit and listen to what remains. My conversation with Gavin Yuan Gao was one such exchange, widening across questions of distance, memory and the seemingly impossible task of approaching what inhabits the body.

Posted in INTERVIEWS | Tagged ,

Argument of Incorporeality

Through the mist-aproned mountain, wind blows a gate open. Years that don’t belong to me flood my palms like coins too heavy to hold. Memories—time’s avalanche sweeping the mountainside of the mind. In my naked namelessness, I lie down in …

Posted in 107: LIMINAL | Tagged

Lullaby

Before the divine inventions of dawn & grief, before all bare beginnings, there is the body’s intention to sing. The river wants to hear it & so does the shadow abandoned by its owner under the chestnut tree, waiting with …

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Letter to Blair from Home

Brother, when the raven came for me last night in its black cassock, when my breath was sweetened with dreaming, I heard you call to me in that bell-clear treble, Roy, Roy, and knew there would be no peace, as …

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged