Books@Stones event: Nebulous Vertigo by Belle Ling

Join us at Books@Stones on Tuesday 26 August for a special event with local poet Belle Ling in-conversation with Bronwyn Lea to celebrate the launch of Belle's latest poetry collection, Nebulous Vertigo.

Formally daring poems that ask a compelling question: if fate can never be changed, how can we embrace its weaving?

The realm that belongs to Nebulous Vertigo is both visceral and vibrant, and it is mysteriously familiar. If you come close to it, you will hear how rains eat, how a silken tofu revolts, how the Chinese word for “beans” turns into a speaking persona, and how a telephone bridges the surviving and the afterlife. In Nebulous Vertigo, everyday life is inevitably lost to the inevitable fate. And yet, with unexpected quivers, our fate and life keep surprising us.

Traveling through the cha chaan teng in Hong Kong, you can hear how Mrs. Suen, Mr. Yuen, and Waiter Kuen carry out intriguing conversations; astounded by the night sky in Paris, you will see how constellations narrate the lovers’ quirky destiny; and all the way through the Sayama Hills in Tokorozawa, you will be surprised by the turnings and upturnings of the myths told by a Japanese Uncle.

Nebulous Vertigo, as its title beckons, “sighs an unreal cloud / for the fated sun to rise.” If fate can never be changed, how can we embrace its weaving? Every attempt, as the poems suggest, can be calmingly adventurous, unobvious yet magnanimous.

Belle Ling was born and grew up in Hong Kong and has lived in Australia. She is a Co-Winner of the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, a Fellowship Awardee of the Playa Residency in Oregon, and a Lucy Morris Stevens Scholar awarded by the Emmanuel College at the University of Queensland. Her poetry manuscripts were respectively highly commended for the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the First Book Poetry Prize of Puncher and Wattmann. Her works can be found in World Literature Today, Chicago Quarterly Review, the Australian Book Review, the Atlanta Review, Cordite Poetry Review, Meanjin, Overland, the Mascara Literary Review, among others. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Queensland. She is now working as a creative strategist at Guild HK.

Bronwyn Lea was born in Tasmania and grew up in Papua New Guinea and Queensland. She is the author of four books of poetry, including Flight Animals (UQP), The Other Way Out (Giramondo), and The Deep North (George Braziller). Her honours include fellowships with Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Bellagio Center. She has served as series editor of The Best Australian Poetry, inaugural editor of Australian Poetry Journal, and poetry editor at Meanjin (2018–2023). She teaches contemporary literature and creative writing at the University of Queensland.