Portrait of Amelia Zhou. Photo by Justin Tam.
September 2023
Passage Series #7
Forthcoming
About the book
"Early on in Amelia Zhou’s Repose, the speaker asks the reader “do all lost things live in ruins?” Ruins—as in aftermath, as in refuse, as in the rotting and wilted physical landscape—permeate this deft and roving collection of poems. Zhou’s work rests in the fleeting space of bodies in motion, the friction of bodies troubling and inhabiting spaces across planes and distances. Zhou does not attempt to still the movement. Instead, she allows it to fold and create its own repetitions, logic, and accord. All along the way, Zhou opens up a space for the spectral to exist alongside the ruins. Towards the end of Repose, she writes “All that distinguishes is a reminder there is something still from the secret, accreting.” In this way, Repose loops, billows, and folds on itself. With the patience that permeates this entire collection, Zhou simply makes a notation of this accretion and demands nothing else of it. Go slow, this collection suggests and with Zhou guiding us, we can."
—Asiya Wadud
Amelia Zhou's Repose is the 2022 Open Reading Period Book Prize winner, and was selected by guest judge Asiya Wadud.
About the author
Amelia Zhou works with writing and movement, with an interest in exploring their various intersections as they arise in forms such as poetry, prose, or performance. In 2021 she was awarded Gold Prize at the Creative Future Writers’ Awards (UK) and was a recipient of the Ultimo Prize (Australia), both for prose. Her work has been published most recently in Overland, LUMIN Journal, and Ambit; exhibited at Orleans House Gallery; with further writing in numerous UK and Australian publications. She holds a MA in Creative Practice from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music & Dance (2020) and is an incoming PhD student in English at the University of Cambridge. Born and raised in Sydney, Australia, she now lives in London.