NEW POETRY BOOK - Ouyang Yu - "Reality Dreams"

Reality Dreams is a new book of poetry by Ouyang Yu, published by Picaro Press. It's available for $15.00, plus postage, Australia-wide.

What is reality? What are dreams? What are reality dreams or dream realities? These poems collected here are a profound exploration into the borderlands of dream and reality where the two become one and death re-dies, only to live again.

The original manuscript consists of 218 poems but this prepared manuscript comprises only 117 poems.

Enquiries to jcjohnson@iinet.net.au

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These unsettling, breezily imaginative poems are reminiscent of deep-night jottings in an analysand’s bedside notebook. In Reality Dreams Ouyang Yu cooks up something much more complex than a simple surrealist recipe. Once you enter his dreamworld, his stunning imagery never lets you drift off. This poetry is perplexing, comical, sometimes elegiac, sometimes mysterious, often frankly visceral, sexy and sensual. Here, in one world-weary reverie, Australia is ‘so deadly boring, so boringly dead’ that we can only hope that a fearsome Chinese phantom might suddenly awaken the entire place by shouting thunderously loudly, ‘Onya Ouyang!’
— Pam Brown

Ouyang Yu’s poetry takes energy — a kind of fission — from the forced collision of Chinese and English, of Chinese and Western conventions, habits of thought, and manners of expression. A definite energy and vigour arise from their enjambement. The facture can be deliberately rough and direct, offering opportunity for wonderful elisions of scene and logic that these dream poems enable. The poems reflect an urgent attempt at orientation, a navigation of the foreign, and of the familiar becoming strange.
— Ken Bolton