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