Author(s): Luoyang Chen

Poetry

Flow explores what it is like to carry a precarious identity. Throughout Flow, you’ll find a body that acts and voices that flow as they enter each act. Imaginative, lyrical, elegiac, experimental... these are poems of yearning and grief, of rejection and acceptance, of body and obsession, of kinship and solitude, of brute and home, of immigration and boundary, of kindness.

To flow is to love and to allow social and emotional complexity to be richly present, but flow can also destroy or deliver cataclysmic consequences when driven by ideology or violence. Chen explores this binary with a rare and beguiling combination of metapoetic wit, heart and disarming political analysis. Aggregate complexity is delivered in deceptively simple lyrics that often test the page as field, exploiting bold enjambments and lineation. – A Frances Johnson

Born and raised in a small town in Fujian, China, Luoyang Chen has been residing on the unceded Noongar land since 2021. Luoyang is interested in 自然 (the unconcealing/it-self), love and dying, lyric I, and ‘O’. He writes poetry.