Foreign Matter & Other Poems

'Ouyang Yu's Foreign Matter rages against the vacuity of suburban life, alert to every racist slight, with a linguistic playfulness that shuffles and bounces through English language via the "gibberish keyings of an irrelevant computer". Here Australia is often depicted as an unabashed identity-less dystopia, a volatile yet bland melting-pot of adopted and imported cultures, a "prisonful" of freedom. From Melbourne's bay of "muddy fury", to uneventful suburbs and mown lawns, displaced characters flicker through anger and resignation, cynicism or bemusement, or even psychological breakdown - as sharply depicted in the sequence "Lines Written at the Melbourne Mental" that plays on the word 'home'. These prickly observations untangle the enduring uneasiness that's felt in both past and present countries, inhabiting a house "made of time" more than of space. Relentlessly critical, Ouyang's jagged nuanced poems shred any boundaries, fuelled by their clear-eyed "foreign matter" that is both catalyst and lament.' - Gig Ryan