AustLit

'Contemporary Asian Australian Poets Student Book is a study of the prescribed poems of six Asian Australian poets from the 2013 poetry collection Contemporary Asian Australian Poets edited by Adam Aitken, Kim Cheng Boey, and Michelle Cahill, along with several additional texts. It has been designed to fulfil the requirements of the NSW Stage 6 English Year 12 Standard Module A: Language, Identity and Culture.

'Students have the opportunity to engage in an enjoyable and detailed study of the ways different authors use language to reflect and shape individual and collective identity. Students will engage in close reading of the following prescribed poems:

• ‘This is Where it Begins’ by Merlinda Bobis

• ‘Home’ by Miriam Wei Wei Lo

• ‘New Accents’ by Ouyang Yu

• ‘Mother’ by Vuong Pham

• ‘Circular Breathing’ by Jaya Savige

• ‘Translucent Jade’ by Maureen Ten (Ten Ch’in Ü)'

 (Publication summary)

'There has been a rich history of anthologising Australian poetry this far into the twenty-first century. This article claims that contemporary poetics, with a renewed focus on the recoprocal relation between cultural and linguistic inquiry, can rediscover alternative ways of reading the history of Australian avant-garde, inventive and experimental work. Considering several key anthologies published after the turn of last century, the article provides readings of both the frameworks the anthology-makers provide and the poems themselves, claiming that mark, trace and lexical segmentivities can already be read as social. It then proposes a new possibility for an experimental anthology that might bring these facets into lived praxis: the chrestomathy.' (Publication abstract)