Visions & Revisions
Poets Bella Li and Lucy Van think through poetics, histories, and how to wield language on one’s own terms. Hosted by James Jiang.
Featuring
About the Event
Each work that engages with history (and all do, to some degree or another) raises questions about how our visions and revisions of the past … inform the ways in which we live now, the ways we make sense of and treat each other, the ways we see beyond our individual moments to broader fractures and allegiances, collective memories or amnesias. – Bella Li, Liminal Interview #73 (2018)
Poems are inevitably entangled in our fraught and fraying histories. Projecting such visions and revisions of the past, a poem is an assemblage, a translation, a palimpsest. As Lucy Van writes in The Open: ‘Each day here is different. But say that each day here is the same. In this way, each day has no history. In this way, desire.’
A poem as history’s cracked mirror; a kind of opening; a rock thrown into a lost lake. Hosted by Sydney Review of Books editor James Jiang, this event sees Bella Li and Lucy Van think through histories, poetics and how to wield language on one’s own terms.
Supported by the Sydney Review of Books
Presented in partnership with Liminal
Accessibility
Accessible toilets available
Assistive Listening
Registered Assistance Animals welcome
Wheelchair accessible
For information regarding accessibility at The Wheeler Centre, click here.
Please notify us of all access requirements when booking online so we can assist you with your visit. If you require further information, please contact ticketing@wheelercentre.com.
About the Bookseller
The bookseller for this event is Amplify Bookstore.
About Liminal Festival
Bringing together some of the continent’s most talented writers, the Liminal Festival contemplates the language of our shared histories and future.
The Liminal Festival is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.
Featuring
Bella Li is the author of Argosy (2017), Lost Lake (2018), and Theory of Colours (2021), published by Vagabond Press. Her books have won the Victorian and NSW premiers awards for poetry, and an ABDA award for book design.
Lucy Van is an Asian-Australian poet, lecturer, and researcher. She is a recipient of the Lockie Fellowship (University of Melbourne, 2024), the Overland Malcolm Robertson Foundation Residency (2019), and the Melbourne Research Fellowship (University of Melbourne, 2018). Her poetry collection, The... Read more
James Jiang is a writer, editor, and recovering academic. He edits the Sydney Review of Books, and was previously Assistant Editor at Griffith Review and Australian Book Review. His essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of scholarly and generalist publications in Australia and abroad. ... Read more
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