'We Speak of Flowers' Gadigal Country Launch

In conversation with Lachlan Brown

We Speak of Flowers, Eileen Chong’s sixth collection, is a wondrous extended elegy dedicated to her ancestors. Its 101 pieces are a spacious, meditative record of an attempt to make sense of grief in the face of great pain. Chong’s interweaving of memory, history and possibility showcases her mastery of poetic form and craft, all the while displaying her signature light touch in exploring the pathos of things. This is poetry that thrums with feeling, of deep connections to place and ancestral roots, and of the search for meaning in a broken world.

‘Grief shatters our speech and our self. Eileen Chong honours this, yet also elevates the fragment into a capacious poetry, where each shard is whole in itself, connected to others and to the world. We Speak of Flowers is revelatory in its associative clarities, profound in its images and silences, raw, tender and devastating. I relished this astonishing and nourishing book, and will return to it again and again.’ – Andy Jackson

‘We Speak of Flowers is proof positive of Eileen Chong’s distinction and musicality as a poet. As a series of fragments built to be shuffled around by the reader, she offers us a welcome chance to sing alongside her in a chorus of sensation and memory.’ – Alison Whittaker

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