Cirrus@Austlit

'Eileen Chong identifies writing as “an act of recovery, of piecing together, of recording, re-ordering and re-inventing.” In Painting Red Orchids, her third collection, the poet scans the stormy dissonance of places populated by particular emotional weathers, and this short book of lyrical investigation is a virtuosic performance of “questions fall[ing] like wet leaves” against, perhaps, the wet black boughs of turbulent experience.'