Author: Ben Yi-Yu Qin | $55.00 | Hard cover, Swiss binding; Full colour pages, page inserts, internal pockets fold out pages, transparent pages | 163mm x 240mm | 211 pages + covers | 10 stories, colour artworks | Published by Ern Malley Press Available from February 2025

About the book

• A Lobster Scales the Shoals is a book of poetry, accompanied by photography, with deliberate material interventions made to its presentations of linguistic and visual meaning, through methods usually associated with art or artist books.

• the poetry is diverse in form, ranging from short to prose poems, all set in deliberate interaction with the materiality of the book – its manner of presentation on the page.

• the book’s material interventions include features such as page colour, fold out pages, inserts,

transparent paper, internal pockets etc.

• its mode of production, release and implied engagement with readers also reflects the position held by its author in respect of the current state of the publishing and distribution of literary works in Australia, contingent social phenomena which are exposable to comment. That is to say, one notable feature about this book, its status as ‘micro-’, ‘self’ or ‘independently’ published, contains further meanings designed and intended to be interpreted by readers (see: ‘Ern Malley Press’ wesbite in links section below).

• some of the poetry in this book has featured in a different material form of 3 Little Red Books/3 本小红书, alongside other of the author’s poetry-based installation artworks, in a 2024 National Gallery of Victoria’s Melbourne Design Week exhibition, And the word was God.

STATEMENT OF INTENT:

The poetry in this collection of necessity touches upon large swathes of the immigrant experience and comments, from both an intimate and estranged persepctive, on Australian experiences of personality, community and culture. It is the condition of an immigrant to have a double perspective of being both inside and outside a social and cultural order, but it is perhaps one of the fundamental sentiments of this collection that all modern Australians are outside of themselves and their homeplaces.

This poetry is a representative of the Modernist manner that aims constantly to stretch, manipulate and advance the expressive forms available to literary expression, in response to a human experience that is likewise cotinuously contorted by changeable realities. Modernist in manner, this poetry is also Romantic in some essential aspect and proceeds in the tradition of Modern Romantic poets like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane, in seeking a potentially redemptive substance of feeling in the images composed out of a fractured modernity. The distance, however, between Australia and the United States is vast, just as the seeming distance between this century and the previous begins to seem yawning. This poetry is an Australian re-reading of the Modern Romantic tradition and reflects an Australian difference that is perhaps more in a minor key, more humorous and more digressive.

Books are not empty, incidental vessels for the meanings they contain. A Lobster Scales the Shoals is also a book that seeks to contribute to an expansion of awareness, in the minds of Australian readers, of the types of books and textual expressions that are singular yet fall within entirely feasible ranges of production.

The publication of this book is an act within my own power. Convention, expectation – what an ethnic immigrant can or apparently ought to think and say – and the economics not only of poetry but art book publishing in Australia act as obstacles to a cultural flourishing among immigrant communities who may count themselves among the spiritual transients of this world. I have not waited for my afforded moment, as I have made clear in being independently published under the name of Ern Malley Press.