AustLit

'My shoulders lurch back and an involuntary murmur slips through my lips; almost primal, it’s the thrill evoked by animals on display. The small child next to me inches closer to his mother, words whistling out between the gap in his teeth: ‘what is he doing?’'  (Introduction)

'‘I have the best job in the world,’ said the man who hanged himself in a hotel in Northeastern France on 8 June.

'It is 2014. Two years since I swore off Australian poetry: a couple of years earlier, I’d wandered into an erotic poetry reading in Brunswick, where an older white man patted himself on the back for fucking a local sex worker in Bali. I was the only Asian-background person in the room. I walked out thinking Australian poetry was unsexy at best, creepy and racist at worst.' (Introduction)