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Winner - Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2023 - Poetry
Winner, 2020 Thomas Shapcott Award
From the 2020 winner of the Thomas Shapcott Award comes a sophisticated, impressive and rich collection of poetry that unpacks the complexity of family, grief, and cross-cultural and queer identity.
These richly allusive poems weigh violence and tenderness, wound and cure, history and future. Boldly and tenderly, they balance loss and gain, adventure and quiet, as they hum to one another of love and loss. This is a scintillating and exhilarating collection from an accomplished and distinctive new voice.
Author: Gavin Yuan Gao
Paperback Published 1 February 2022 128 pages
‘Grounded in Chinese as in English, “the shadow play of mind” behind Gavin Yuan Gao’s lyric voice brings to family life, and our familiar universe, new colours and the new force and range of feeling. A remarkable debut.’ -David Malouf
‘Woven with stunning imagery and heart, Gavin Yuan Gao’s At the Altar of Touch aches with grief, love, soul, sensuality, darkness, and light.’ - Anna Jacobson