At the Altar of Touch
by Gavin Yuan Gao

From the 2020 winner of the Thomas Shapcott Award comes a sophisticated, impressive and rich collection of poetry that unpacks the complexity of family, grief, and cross-cultural and queer identity.

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Overview

These richly allusive poems weigh violence and tenderness, wound and cure, history and future. Boldly and tenderly, they balance loss and gain, adventure and quiet, as they hum to one another of love and loss. This is a scintillating and exhilarating collection from an accomplished and distinctive new voice.

Details

Awards

David Malouf

‘Grounded in Chinese as in English, “the shadow play of mind” behind Gavin Yuan Gao’s lyric voice brings to family life, and our familiar universe, new colours and the new force and range of feeling. A remarkable debut.’

Anna Jacobson

‘Woven with stunning imagery and heart, Gavin Yuan Gao’s At the Altar of Touch aches with grief, love, soul, sensuality, darkness, and light.’

Stuart Barnes

‘Gavin Yuan Gao’s debut collection is a dazzlingly inventive modern elegy. Their graceful, surprising and exhilarating lyricism sings to family, memory, language, love, racism, war, and flora and fauna. Music—Abing’s, opera, hymn—billows through bold, lively and tender poems that shine with the light of their own golds and silvers, suns and moons, and fires and waters; as we read them we become ‘deer leaping straight from the heart’s fountain.’ At the Altar of Touch is crucial, clear-eyed and virtuosic; ‘a stage on which the world, waking, rehearses its kindness.’

Judges' comments, Prime Minister's Literary Award

‘At the Altar of Touch is an achingly beautiful, rewarding ode to persistence and passion and is a startling poetic debut.’

Gavin Yuan Gao

Born in Beijing, Gavin Yuan Gao is a genderqueer, bilingual immigrant poet who grew up in Beijing and Brisbane. They hold a BA (magna cum laude) in English Literature and Creative Writing from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. They live in Brisbane and read poetry for The Adroit Journal. At theAltar of Touch is their first book.