Ouyang Yu’s Fainting with Freedom moves through English and Chinese thought-patterns, migrant experience, memory.

Yu lets them grind against one another, using anguage here as porous, and somewhat unstable material. Things get mistranslated, literalised, bent, repeated, mocked and made strange enough that the assumptions buried inside it become visible.

Yu repeatedly resists the tidy migrant narrative in which identity is divided between two cultures and poetry nobly stitches the halves together; instead, the poems occupy the messier territory of estrangement, linguistic double vision and belonging badly in several places at once. Forms appear only to be dismantled, jokes curdle into history, and moments of apparent simplicity reveal a more hostile philosophical underside. The collection was shortlisted for the 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize. 

Edition: Five Islands Press, 2015. First edition, great condition, paperback. 96 pages.