Contemporary Asian Australian Poets

Book excerpt: This ground-breaking anthology collects poems written by Australian poets who are migrants, their children, and refugees of Asian heritage, spanning work that covers over three decades of writing. Inclusive of hitherto marginalised voices, these poems explore the hyphenated and variegated ways of being Asian Australian, and demonstrate how the different origins and traditions transplanted from Asia have generated new and different ways of being Australian. This anthology highlights the complexity of Asian Australian interactions between cultures and languages, and is a landmark in a rich, diversely-textured and evolving story. Timely and proactive this anthology fills existing cultural gaps in poetic expressions of home, travel, diaspora, identity, myth, empire and language.