Chinese Fish is Grace Yee’s debut poetry collection, a sharp, formally playful book that moves through family history, migration, labour, and inheritance.

The poems centre on a Chinese New Zealand family running takeaway shops, tracing the textures of everyday life—menus, shopfronts, kitchen rituals, suburban geography—while quietly exposing the racial and cultural negotiations that sit beneath them.

Yee’s work shifts easily between humour and unease. The poems carry the rhythms of speech and storytelling, but they’re also structurally attentive: repetition, fragmentation, and layered voices build a portrait of diaspora that is both intimate and historically aware. 

The result is a collection that feels contemporary without chasing fashion: observant, sly, and attentive to the strange poetry of ordinary survival.