Three Durians

Three Durians by Troy Wong explores the poet's South-East Asian identity, posing questions about his Chinese ancestry and examining his positionality as the Australian-born son of disillusioned migrants from Singapore. Like the durian, his is an experience of liminality and contradiction, of divided opinions and ambivalence.

Wong questions what it means to be an Asian man in White Australia, exploring performative and relational masculinities and sexualities, as well as the alternate, possible selves of the old country and the new. These poems display a deeply considered poetics of extremity: he isn’t interested in performing a palatable version of Asianness for himself or for anyone else.

These are poems of wayfinding, of persistence, of a ripe, splitting open of an interior self; poems that arise from mistranslation between people, cultures, and countries. They are fierce, tender poems of dreaming and escape, of the body and flesh and spirit. These poems demand that we smell, taste, swallow, and remember them.