Divinations on Survival

Natalie Linh Bolderston’s debut collection traces her matrilineal heritage across continents and centuries, interweaving her voice with those of her mother and grandmother. The poems move between 1930s China, 1970s Vietnam and an ancient landscape populated by mothers, daughters and deities from Vietnamese and Chinese myth. Divinations on Survival asks what it means to share a lineage in the shadow of war, and traces the complex legacies of survival that emerge as a result of conflict. Always returning to the question of how intimate, familial ties are warped and undone by political turmoil, violence and displacement, the collection distils and expands on stories passed down from grandmother to mother, to daughter, and casts women not as victims, but as powerful protectors, healers and survivors. Formally innovative and supple, these poems disrupt and unsettle meaning, confronting the colonising force of language to work towards a radical new poetics.

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