How to be dead in a year of snakes / Chris Tse.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tse, Chris, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

New Zealand poetry--21st century.

New Zealand poetry.

Poetry.

Poets, New Zealand--21st century.

Poets, New Zealand.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (80 p.)

Place of Publication:

Auckland, New Zealand : Auckland University Press, 2014.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In 1905, white supremacist Lionel Terry murdered the Cantonese gold prospector Joe Kum Yung to draw attention to his crusade to rid New Zealand of Chinese and other east Asian immigrants. Author Chris Tse uses this story—and its reenactment for a documentary a hundred years later—to reflect on the experiences of Chinese migrants of the period, their wishes and hopes, their estrangement and alienation, their ghostly reverberation through a white-majority culture. Along the way readers visit the gold fields of the south; a shipwreck in the Hokianga that left the spirits of 500 Chinese gold miners in an unmemorialized limbo for a hundred years; and the streets of Newtown, Wellington, where Lionel Terry went out one night “looking for a Chinaman.” Chris Tse’s flickering use of imagery, resonant language, and flexible pronouns are particularly suited to the historic events he describes and the viewpoints he shifts through. How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes is a welcome poetic addition to New Zealand literature.

Contents:

Title; Imprint; Epigraph; Poems; Cover; Index of titles and first lines; About the author

Notes:

Includes index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed March 1, 2017).

ISBN:

9781775587552

177558755X

9781775587545

1775587541

9781775587576

1775587576

OCLC:

890645519