5 Questions with Grace Yee
Grace Yee’s poetry has been widely published and anthologised in Australia and internationally. Her awards include the Patricia Hackett Prize, the Peter Steele Poetry Award, a Creative Fellowship at the State Library Victoria, and grants from Creative Victoria and the Australia Council. She has taught creative writing at Deakin University, and at the University of Melbourne, where she completed a PhD on settler Chinese women’s storytelling in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Her debut collection Chinese Fish won the 2024 Victorian Prize for Literature, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, and the Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Poetry.
Her second collection, Joss: A History, was published by Giramondo in June 2025.
No.1
What was your outlining process like when starting Joss: A History?
The first poems weren’t written with a larger project in mind. I had collected a few nineteenth and early twentieth century books about China, narrated in the kind of beautiful, beguiling English prose the empire is known for, and was fascinated by the elegant ‘anthropological’ language used to describe Chinese people and culture: the paternalistic tone, the strong aura of authority. I extracted phrases from these books and played with them alongside extracts from my journals, and that’s how the first poems were drafted. Some of them were submitted to Overland—Toby Fitch published them and to my surprise, he suggested that there could be a collection there.
Soon after that the State Library Victoria Creative Fellowship opportunity came along and I decided to integrate the early poems into a collection focused on settler Chinese Australian histories. The project was driven by two perspectives: mainstream histories/stories about early Chinese settlers in Australia, and early Chinese settler responses to these. I focused on Victoria and New South Wales first, and the Aotearoa poems were worked in later.
No.2
This second book of poetry comes a couple of years after your debut, Chinese Fish (2023, also with Giramondo). What continuities do you see between both books, considering they are about early Chinese settlers in so-called Australia and Aotearoa? Did you find yourself working on both at the same time?
I worked on both books over a couple of years but not simultaneously. The earlier draft for Chinese Fish was mostly finished by the time I began working on Joss in earnest.
There are definite continuities—and obsessions! Both books foreground and play with histories and illuminate little-known stories about ordinary people. They both write against enduring colonialist orientalist narratives. Both involved listening to and playing with diverse voices and feature multiple narrators.
No.3
The final line in Joss’s synopsis tells us that this book is “grounded in the conviction that the past is not past, that historical events reverberate insistently in the present”. Can you speak more to this? What is the book’s relationship to temporality?
I was thinking of how colonialist-imperialist narratives and ideologies have endured, and the insidious power of stories that continue to diminish entire communities—not only Chinese communities, but other minority groups as well. I had in mind a sense of time in which the past is not past, but a living, breathing, hindering beast.
When a marginal group is targeted, the same old histories and stories are disseminated, often characterised by accusations of ‘filth’, ‘disease’, ‘immorality’, ‘backwardness’, etc. We saw this during the pandemic, when Chinese people (or those who simply ‘looked’ Chinese) were targeted and sinophobic sentiments re-surfaced with vehemence—amid protestations of ‘for goodness sake, it’s 2021!’ as if progress could be defined by the passing of time alone.
‘Chineseness’ as object of derision—and relatedly, source of mirth—still has currency [today]. When slurs and dehumanising stories are repeated, they sustain an undertow that keeps both speaker and target moored to their histories. The opening and closing poems in Joss challenge assumptions of progress. The opening poem ‘longest imperial dragon’ is about the long tail of colonialism + imperialism: ‘we are all the time treading water and nursing our amnesias…’; and the closing poem ‘This story’ observes the colonialist ‘imperative to maintain the world’s organs in their correct anatomical positions’.
No.4
In our previous interview regarding Chinese Fish, you said that it “had to be a polyphonic ‘messy’ work”. Of course, the latter is filled with characters’ narrations, while Joss is a more straightforward collection. How did you approach voice and style in Joss?
Each poem tells a different story and as such, needed a different approach and voice/s. Some poems are narrated in ‘colonialist’ voices, some in ‘Chinese’ voices, some combine the two. There are ‘journalistic’ reporting voices, monologue poems, a dialogue poem and a couple of book-review poems. The archival extracts feature ‘official’ state voices. The couplets feature one line in a ‘Chinese’ voice, and one in an ‘Australian’ voice. I didn’t set out to write with quite so many voices, but the research revealed so much noise, [so] the urge for inclusion and interplay kicked in.
No.5
Who are some of your favourite poets who also work with archives?
I’m inspired by Natalie Harkin’s Archival Poetics, Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, and anything by Bhanu Kapil. I’m most interested in poets whose work is hybrid or cross-genre, that challenges and expands the usual preconceptions of what poetry ‘is’.
(Credit: Demelza Wong)
Find out more
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.
Get it from Giramondo here.