9.45pm, my new collection of poetry

A new collection of poems that refuses to behave.

Over 170 poems, many titled with nothing more than a time of day — 7.35am, 2.20.24pm, 9.45pm — as if the clock were the only honest witness to what actually happened. What happened is rarely what you’d expect. These are poems of displacement and stubbornness, of living between languages, of watching Australia from the inside with permanently outside eyes.

Ouyang Yu writes in English the way a man speaks when he has stopped trying to please — directly, sometimes roughly, occasionally in pieces. The poems move between the personal and the political without asking permission, pausing to skewer literary culture one moment and to sit quietly with loneliness the next.

The back cover says it plainly: burning it is easier / burying it harder / swallowing it the hardest. The poems choose none of these. They choose to stay on the page and make themselves heard.

9.45 pm is the work of a poet who has been writing across two cultures for decades and has run out of patience for pretending that’s a comfortable place to be. It is, in the best sense, difficult company.

《9.45 pm》——欧阳昱诗集

这是诗人、作家、翻译家欧阳昱的最新英文诗集，由 Otherland Publishing 出版。

全书收录逾170首诗，以时刻命名的诗题贯穿始终——9.45pm、7.35am、2.20.24pm——像一部私密的时间日志，记录的却是比时间更难捕捉的东西：身份的错位，语言的边界，澳大利亚的日常与荒诞，以及一个华裔诗人在异乡持续写作的执念与反抗。

诗集的语言利落、直白，有时近乎口语，甚至刻意破坏语法——那种”破”本身就是诗意所在。书封上的一段文字写道：

burning it is easier / burying it harder / swallowing it the hardest

这或许是整本书最准确的自我注解。

欧阳昱以英文写作数十年，游走于澳中两种文化之间，用一种外来者的眼睛打量澳大利亚，又用一个澳大利亚人的距离回望中国。《9.45 pm》延续他一贯的犀利与幽默，在沉默与喧嚣之间，选择说话。