Cirrus@Austlit

'Resilience looks upwards to the ever-changing, ever-present skies, where fingers and fist touch the horizon. Resilience is often deeply imagined and hard won. Resilience, by turn, is fervent, supple, rhizomatic, generative. Like the beguiling evenness of an orchid, resilience is enduring and delicate.

'To celebrate its 15th year Mascara Literary Review presents their first print anthology, featuring writing that addresses and explores the theme of resilience through fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. In this anthology, writers explore the multiplicity of resilience – rebellious and experimental, paving the way to reclaim, rewrite and amplify. Resilience offers a futuristic and promising gaze into the future: What does it look like? How did we get here? What have we lost and/or inherited? '

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Three months before my paternal grandmother dies, I sit across from her in my auntie’s apartment in Nanjing, China. Her hair is dark grey and tied into a low ponytail. She wears square, wire-framed glasses that match the shape of her face: a shape she has passed down to my father, passed down to me.' (Introduction)