On Saturday 22 March, Radio National's Poetica featured the Puncher & Wattman anthology Contemporary Asian Australian Poets. You can listen to or download the program by going to the Radio National website.
List of poems :
- Adam Aitken 'Alexandria'
- Ivy Alvarez 'Curing the animal'
- Merlinda Bobis 'Litany'
- Michelle Cahill 'Kali from Abroad'
- Shen 'Noodles'
- Misbah Khokhar 'Veils as flags'
- Bella Li 'Voyage'
- Andy Quan 'The leg crosser'
- Eileen Chong 'Mid-autumn mooncakes'
- Debbie Lim 'How to grow feet of Golden Lotus'
- Christine Ratnasingham 'Dark Skin' (extract)
- Paul Dawson 'Thanks for the poems, Pauline Hanson'
- Kim Cheng Boey 'Plumb blossom or Quong Tart'
The program page says “This ground-breaking anthology collects poems written by Australian poets who are migrants, their children, and refugees of Asian heritage. The poets’ Australian-tinged voices range from Pakistan to Singapore to Thailand to Goa and beyond, telling diverse, richly textured and evolving stories. The anthology spans work from over three decades of writing and addresses a long-standing absence in Australian publishing: according to the 2011 census, almost one in eight Australians has Asian ancestry, with the percentage higher in our major cities, yet you'd never guess this from our published poetry. Contemporary Asian Australian Poets provides a fascinating introduction to this body of work, with poetic expressions of home, travel, diaspora, identity, myth, empire and language”.