Thuy On’s Turbulence is a debut made up of poems fluttering between domestic life and displacement, between the inherited pressure of one generation and the self-fashioning of the next. 

On explores this through some of the binaries we see in relationships, of daughter and adult, Vietnamese and Australian, private self and public language. The collection’s turbulence is emotional, cultural and linguistic at once; poems often begin from ordinary material — paperwork, deadlines, family habits, the body, household debris — and widen into questions of belonging, translation and hurt. There is humour here, but also abrasion, especially around the pressures placed on women, migrants and the children of migrants to become legible to institutions and families alike.

A compact, sharp debut from an Australian Vietnamese poet, and a very good example of contemporary poetry using the domestic as a pressure chamber for larger histories.

UWA Publishing / UWAP, Crawley, Western Australia, 2020. First edition. Paperback. Very light shelf wear to covers, with minor handling marks only. Internally clean and unmarked; binding firm. Near fine condition.