AustLit

'Winner of the prestigious Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, Jaya Savige’s latecomers is a first collection of poems by one of Australia’s most exciting young poets. Lively, playful, and always intelligent, Savige’s poems show an awareness of place, of the inescapability of history, and a personal commitment to the precision of language. ‘The poems in latecomers go beyond what we take for granted these days in a first collection: refinement of language and cadence, allusiveness, wit. Moving easily through abstract wonders and the streets of the inner city, they return for nourishment to family and ‘the Island’ – Bribie, its fishing-life and beaches – as a test always of what is native and endures’ – DAVID MALOUF' (Publication summary)

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. [from Trove]