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Poetry in the Cities of LiteratureGrace Yee

Please, meet Grace Yee from Melbourne City of Literature.
Grace Yee is the author of Chinese Fish, winner of the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Poetry in Australia, and the Mary & Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Chinese Fish is published by Giramondo in Australia, and slated for publication with Akoya in the UK in 2026. Her second collection Joss: A History (also Giramondo) is out in June 2025. 
graceyeepoet.com


how to launch a poemi) recall democracy is pretty numbers & orange clusters,strategically bold and critically wet, intemperate type-cphotographs;ii) advance stagger: inkjet-laboured nested griefs & hybridanimals, radio waves & gaze-detail, yellow tableaux & charliefoxtrot figments, clusterfucks;iii) shoot east shoot west, strike a pose, teem prada, preoccupywith night lights, sex and billboards, sex on billboards, belledskirts & wasted chaste;iv) grandscale the food you eat the way you eat the hell you eat,immaterial bread in a hot-desk-metropolis-cum-umbrage, huff,shirtfront a superpower;v) manipulate sewer systems, decompress anomie in cinematicframes, long exposures, far-flung procrastinations;vi) tilt abs, beams & lunar grief, levitate laundry lists, fold &stack;vii) dispense the demerits of your own internal terrain, drain,simulate the passing of witnesses, chrome, crack seizures,flicker;viii) suck sea-garbage, disorient the landscape, portraithorizons, harvest documents, document contemplations,posture downward dog and driverless;ix) swing equanimity, aviate the neighbourhood, tourniquettechnologies and all judicial glosses, glow;x) headlight corridors, tunnel frugal, agitate outages andprovisional liminal pipes, frack cooking cleaning stroking,weed;xi) foul the sounds of brooks & birds;xii) keep the glue gun loaded and the bones cool and dense,collate fruit & unbreakable eggs, texturise melamine, unsheatheby the side of the road, surveil;xiii) laminate absurdities, bait ceilings & subfloor spaces,fibrillate the past, box the light there, salt the snow;no more pre-school baby: my poetic practice requires periodicsips of rescue, resuscitated drift, glycerine cocoons (stanzas ofchildbearing & rooms of equal conviction), epsom salts & quietfridays, no jars of meh or party gummies, no cystic alienations,no unnatural breath or bigotry or beef, no astringent graveaffect, but vanishing on waking, capes


The project was created by the Odesa UNESCO City of Literature and being implemented with funds raised by .Reykjavík Bókmenntaborg UNESCO as part of the readings initiated by Milano City of Literature Milano City of Literature “Not Just Words” (Reading for Odesa) on February 24, 2024

Illustration

© 2026 Odesa UNESCO City of Literature

Website courtesy of the Ukrainian Cosmopolis

All rights reserved

Illustration

© 2026 Odesa UNESCO City of Literature

Website courtesy of the Ukrainian Cosmopolis

All rights reserved