Joss: A History - Grace Yee

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.

These are poems of grit and ritual, erasure and persistence, bureaucracy and grace, gold dust and Chinese cemeteries. Here, among the segregated gravestones, Yee captures the cruel, beautiful and ever-messy work of making a place in the world.
Beejay Silcox, Guardian Australia, (Best new Australian book)

Technically innovative and complex, Yee’s work is grounded in extensive archival research and contemporary experience. Time is elastic, layered, as Chinese and colonialist perspectives jostle, as the past leaks into the present. Yee is a poet of conviction, a thought-provoking and distinctive voice in Australasian literature.
Alison Wong (Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate)

Yee’s deft control of irony and collapsing of time burns up all the damaging cultural clichés that white Australia still perpetuates, while lighting up multiple perspectives from across the centuries: ‘you poke the embers with a joss stick,’ Yee writes, ‘and you try to read them.’
Toby Fitch

Part poetry, part prose poetry, part found poetry, part story and history, or part social commentary, this is a short collection of timepieces…designed to capture a cacophony of lost voices, scattered over a sea of Chinese cemeteries, and symbolised by a single self-acclamation: ‘I’m a can’t’.
Ouyang Yu

Grace Yee is a singular voice rising from the ashes of our knotted Chinese Australian past. A poet-historian showing us a way, she excavates archival voices to bring clarity to the present. I am forever changed by her radical multicultural vision for this country.
Sophie Loy-Wilson

A powerful blend of archival research and poetry… Yee turns the found text of newspapers, journals, diaries, customs records, and more to piece together people’s lives… A masterful critique of a significant piece of the Australian colonial narrative.
Ash Davida Jane, Books+Publishing

Giramondo Publishing, 2025
English
Softcover, 80 pages
210mm x 148mm