Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%
Print this page

Words still rise

An adroit and moving collection
by
March 2025, no. 473

We Speak of Flowers by Eileen Chong

University of Queensland Press, $24.99 pb, 113 pp

Buy this book

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.

Words still rise

An adroit and moving collection
by
March 2025, no. 473

In Li-Young Lee’s ‘Furious Versions’, a poem reckoning with his family’s exile, there is a question: ‘How then, may I / speak of flowers / here, where / a world of forms convulses.’ Eileen Chong draws these lines into her sixth book of poetry as an epigraph, reorienting them to find her title, expanding Lee’s first-person singular into the plural ‘we’, its question into statement. This drawing-into-connection and shifting is central to Chong’s poetics, established in her striking début collection, Burning Rice (2011), which includes an image linking women, flowers, and power. ‘The Flower of Forgetting’ ends: ‘Women can be strong. Flowers too.’

We Speak of Flowers

We Speak of Flowers

by Eileen Chong

University of Queensland Press, $24.99 pb, 113 pp

Buy this book

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.

From the New Issue

You May Also Like