Cirrus@Austlit

'As a teenager, one of my favourite movie scenes featured a baby-faced John Cusack standing in his tweed coat and Clash T-shirt, boombox held aloft in the air, blasting Peter Gabriel in a last-ditch attempt to woo back his girl, who is sleeping in the bedroom above. These days, I’ve no desire to revisit the film—I worry that what charmed me in a mainstream eighties rom-com may easily come across as borderline stalker-ish now—but something about the overly earnest scene keeps popping back into my brain. This is important, Cusack’s character says; even if all this is inevitably doomed, I must at least TRY.' (Annabel Bardy-Brown, Editorial introduction)

'Eileen Chong’s luminous poetry examines the histories – personal, familial and cultural – that form our identities and obsessions.

'A Thousand Crimson Blooms is a deepening of her commitment to a poetics of sensuous simplicity and complex emotions, even as she confronts the challenges of infertility or fraught mother–daughter relations. Entwined throughout are questions of migration and belonging.

'Viewed as a whole, this collection is a field of flowers, aflame with light.'' (Publication summary)