Burning Rice
Eileen Chong
Australian Poetry: 2012
.
Peony
Eileen Chong
Pitt Street Press: 2014
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Painting Red Orchids
Eileen Chong
Pitt Street Press: 2016
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Rainforest
Eileen Chong
Pitt Street Press: 2018
.
When we think of ‘world literature’, we tend to think of categories like ‘Asian literature’ or ‘Australian literature’. It speaks to a place-based understanding, but what about the spaces in between—the liminal writing between nations? What about historic literature alive to the now or classical poetries that become contemporary?

We might see the answers to those questions in poems, novels and essays themselves. They make us realise that the frames we place around content can’t possibly contain their perspicacious dynamism; all tasks of critique are, at best, translations that riff off the original form. Poetry that defies a national category, that defies being a simple building block of older forms of ‘world literature’, is an intercostal muscle best interpreted by masseurs waiting in airport lounges—that is, people stuck between borders, able to make sense of many belongings, many knots, ailments and potentialities. This is poetry, and hence criticism, that must contain multitudes.

• Tags: Australia, China, Eileen Chong, Issue 37, Robert Wood, Singapore