At the Altar of Touch

From the 2020 winner of the Thomas Shapcott Award comes a sophisticated, impressive and rich collection of poetry that unpacks the complexity of family, grief, and cross-cultural and queer identity. These richly allusive poems weigh violence and tenderness, wound and cure, history and future. Boldly and tenderly, they balance loss and gain, adventure and quiet, as they hum to one another of love and loss. This is a scintillating and exhilarating collection from an accomplished and distinctive new voice.

Born in Beijing, Gavin Yuan Gao is a genderqueer, bilingual immigrant poet who grew up in Beijing and Brisbane. They hold a BA (magna cum laude) in English Literature and Creative Writing from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. They live in Brisbane and read poetry for The Adroit Journal. At the Altar of Touch is their first book. Born in Beijing, Gavin Yuan Gao is a genderqueer, bilingual immigrant poet who grew up in Beijing and Brisbane. They hold a BA (magna cum laude) in English Literature and Creative Writing from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. They live in Brisbane and read poetry for The Adroit Journal. At the Altar of Touch is their first book.

I Coup de grâ ce Self-Portrait as the Last Wounded Stag 3 Coup de grâ ce 4 Luna Moth 6 The Afterlife 9 1999, or The Year of Mulberry 10 Skein Song 12 Distant Hills 14 Bait: A Queer Myth 16 Edifice 17 For the Man on the Bus Who Told Me to Go Back to Where I Came From 19 II The Moon’ s Annotations Abing Addresses the Shadow of the Camphor Tree 23 Abing Speaks to the Moon about the Loss of His Vision 25 Abing Prays to the Ghost of His Seamstress Mother 27 One Time, My Father, Crying, Drove into the Dusk 29 Glass City Aubade 33 Blue Hour 35 Convalescence 37 Ode to My Uvula 39 III Riverborne Lullaby 43 Self-Portrait as the Winter Sea 45 Riverborne 47 Telemachus Dreams of the Great Flood 49 Calligraphy Lesson 51 ?, or Memory as a Water Language 53 Grandfather Explains His Alzheimer’ s to Me 55 Mangroves, or a Treatise on Ecological Inheritance 56 Queer Physics: First Principle 58 Glass Boat, Glass Shore 59 Nocturne 61 IV At the Altar of Touch Myth, or Luck as a Swan Boat 65 At the Altar of Touch 66 Meadow 72 Peacock 73 Here Again, Yet the Day 76 Requiem with a Singing Kimono 78 Lullaby 82 Opera 84 V The Resurrection Dreaming Mask 89 Needle 91 ‘ Can Dyslexics Read? Can You Prove it?’ 93 Falling 95 The Resurrection 97 Alyssum, Honed 98 Your Gratitude 99 ‘ COVID’ 101 A Chord of Light 104 Wild Nothing 106 Requiem Ending with the Night Sky 108 Notes 111 Acknowledgements 115