Joss: A History
Grace Yee’s follow-up to her triple award-winning poetry collection Chinese Fish.
In the White Hills Cemetery in Bendigo the remains of more than a thousand ‘chinamen’ lie interred, many in unmarked graves. Most were sojourners, who hailed from the Canton region in south China, and found themselves unable to return to their homeland. Joss: A History is inspired by the lived experiences of these early settlers, and their compatriots and descendants across Victoria and New South Wales, and Aotearoa New Zealand. The poems pay tribute to the author’s ancestors, illuminating how they survived – and thrived – amid longstanding colonialist stories that have exoticised and diminished Chinese communities in white settler nations around the Pacific Rim since the gold rushes of the nineteenth century. Refracted through a twenty-first century lens, Joss is grounded in the conviction that the past is not past, that historical events reverberate insistently in the present.
Grace Yee’s poetry has been widely published and anthologised in Australia and internationally. Her awards include the Patricia Hackett Prize, the Peter Steele Poetry Award, a Creative Fellowship at the State Library Victoria, and grants from Creative Victoria and the Australia Council. She has taught creative writing at Deakin University, and at the University of Melbourne, where she completed a PhD on settler Chinese women’s storytelling in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her debut collection Chinese Fish won the 2024 Victorian Prize for Literature, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, and the Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Poetry.
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