We Speak of Flowers (Eileen Chong, UQP)

How can we occupy spaces after death? Where do we place our grief when we lose someone close to us? Eileen Chong (A Thousand Crimson Blooms) explores these tender questions in her latest poetry collection, We Speak of Flowers. Chong’s poems strive to ‘be honest … which is not the same as being truthful’, inviting readers into worlds both visible and invisible. Rather than framing death as an ending, Chong’s work opens it up as a passage into another world, urging readers to deviate from a linear way of grieving and thinking about grief. Chong encourages readers to approach this book-length poem in any order, reflecting a grieving practice akin to those of Chong’s Buddhist ancestors. Each fragment symbolises a day in which the soul lingers in a liminal space before transitioning to the next life. These pages—filled with currawongs, bowls of rice, water floaties, and bathtubs full of tears—evoke a deeply personal and collective experience in which the seemingly insignificant becomes imbued with meaning, and the feeling of disconnection from one’s cultural identity is linked to the placelessness between life and death. Each fragment in this book stitches together the threads of a life, offering readers a way to experience the unique journey into the afterlife. Readers of Li-Young Lee, Sappho and Mosab Abu Toha may find resonance with the poetry in We Speak of Flowers.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Denise Jarrott is an author and writer whose work has appeared in Overland, South Carolina Review, Denver Quarterly and elsewhere. She grew up in Iowa and currently lives in Naarm/Melbourne. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

Category: Reviews