“a deep meditation on fractured origins and the process of remaking” – Eileen Chong
“Brown’s postcards
sing crisp Guangzhou mornings and hints of dry Australian sunsets”–
Sam Wagan Watson
A hoarding Chinese
grandmother fills her home with objects, unable to distinguish between the
value of things. Meanwhile, her Asian-Australian grandson travels to China for
the first time, wary of the revelations that the trip might offer, as he tries
to make sense of his own Chinese and Anglo-Australian background. In Guangzhou,
Kaiping, Shanghai, and Beijing, amidst the incessant construction and
consumption of twenty-first-century China, a shadowy heritage reveals and
withholds itself, while the suburbs he knows from back home are threaded into the
cities he visits, forming an intricately braided Chinese-Australian
inheritance.
Lachlan
Brown grew up in Macquarie Fields in South West Sydney. His first collection, Limited Cities (Giramondo, 2012), was
commended for the Mary Gilmore Award. His poems have been shortlisted and
highly commended for the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, the Canberra Poetry Prize,
the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and the Blake
Poetry Prize. He teaches literature at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga.
