A Thousand Crimson Blooms
by Eileen Chong

‘A Thousand Crimson Blooms is Eileen Chong’s most powerful collection yet. Chong's poetry is distinguished by its elegantly controlled, formally controlled, feeling for violence. In the kitchen, at the hospital, in the garden, in the place of the mother, in the place of the grandmother, in intimate rituals, its poetic line holds to that knife-edge between the body’s hungers and its scars. The word “courage” rings through these poems.’

‘A controlled intensity that has become Eileen Chong’s unmistakable voice burns in these poems that are at once cogent, tender, incandescent, brave and vulnerable, a lyric grace that infuses these searing songs of grief, hurt, wounding, love and healing. These are sustaining, necessary poems for our desperate times. Their uncompromising honesty and beauty question, confront, praise, uplift and celebrate human life in all its bewildering complexity.’

‘Spare in form though rich in language, gesture and signification, this new collection of poems extends Eileen Chong’s range and accomplishment. Hers is a work of sociality, where family, friends and compeers mark the infinite calculations of love and loss. “To exist is to resist,” she tells us, and we come to recognise what her gains have cost. And yet grief is a modality through which she celebrates the world. In presenting her life—so open and therefore so vulnerable—she invites the reader to respond in kind, in the acute kindness that animates her work. “Where do we find the strength?” she asks. The answer: in these poems.’