Joss: A History (Grace Yee, Giramondo)

Grace Yee’s Joss: A History uncovers the lives of Chinese immigrants in Australia during the 19th and 20th centuries through a powerful blend of archival research and poetry. Viewing White Australia’s gaze on these early Chinese settlers from her 21st-century perspective, Yee exposes the insidious nature of a narrative shaped and controlled by those in power. Yee’s poems serve as an elegy for lives often unseen or uncelebrated, and a radical act in bringing these individual lives to the surface – even by simply putting their names in print in this context. In writing about the thousands of unmarked graves containing the bodies of Chinese Australians in cemeteries around Victoria, Yee draws the past to the present, giving specific locations that ground them in our lives and invite the reader to bear witness to them. Joss: A History moves between direct, simple descriptions and more complex poeticisms, demonstrating the skill of a poet who can shift in tone and technique to approach her subject matter from many angles. Often using erasure poetry and other text manipulation techniques, Yee turns to the found text of newspapers, journals, diaries, customs records, and more to piece together people’s lives. Following the success of Chinese Fish, Yee’s second book is a masterful critique of a significant piece of the Australian colonial narrative.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Ash Davida Jane is a writer, editor and publisher from Aotearoa New Zealand. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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Category: Reviews