Lines of Desire

Lines of Desire mines the urgencies and paradoxes of contemporary Australian culture, from an agonistic self-interrogation of Asian-Australian identity to a skewering of the reductive categories of left and right in political debate. The poems are permeated by an awareness of the shaping hand of social media in our daily lives, while seeking to fashion a lyrical perspective from the conceptual language of philosophy and criticism. The overarching thread of the collection is desire in its manifold forms, tracing lines of political activism, romantic yearning, sexual exploration, and poetic ambition. The first section, 'In Theory', develops a poetics out of a critique of storytelling before exploring the faultlines of Australian cultural politics; the second section, 'On the Page', traces and satirises poetic ambitions emerging from Romanticism to Instagram; and the third section, 'In the Flesh', seeks embodied knowledge in our human response to the pandemic, lost love, and the natural world.