A Thousand Crimson Blooms

Eileen Chong’s luminous poetry examines the histories—personal, familial, and cultural—that form our identities and obsessions. A Thousand Crimson Blooms is a deepening of her commitment to a poetics of sensuous simplicity and complex emotions, even as she confronts the challenges of infertility or fraught mother–daughter relations. Entwined throughout are questions of migration and belonging. Viewed as a whole, this collection is a field of flowers, aflame with light.

Eileen Chong is an Australian poet of Chinese descent. She was born and raised in Singapore, and came to Australia as an adult migrant. She started writing poetry in 2010, and is the author of eight books published in Australia and the United States. Her work has been shortlisted for numerous prizes. Her first book, Burning Rice, is the first single-author collection of poetry by an Asian-Australian to be studied as part of the NSW HSC English syllabus.