Ouyang Yu

Terminally Poetic Ouyang Yu

'Terminally Poetic is charged with desperation. It's written from an opium den of wasted Australian stereotypes in the Grub Street of the mind. Ouyang Yu puts the alien back in Australian. No one is spared in this exposé of Australian letters, certainly neither the poet nor his reader. A book to climb up in love with.' - Steve Brock




'Terminally Poetic is Ouyang Yu working through the colonial alphabet and undoing it and himself at various turns and forks in the road. This is the individuated poet - one of the most committed poets who undoes poetry as an act of principle, who asks questions of 'who's to blame' in startling and nuanced ways - counting down (or up) through the letters so we can make new words from the poems. He confronts reductionism by disowning it while experiencing it, he confronts expectations of style and mode of writing it by writing it and then laughing at himself and the expectations of his readers. Excoriating and yet strangely vulnerable, the poet takes on the poet and poetry's failure to be noticed, to matter, to be what it wants to be.' - John Kinsella