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Rachael Li Ming Chong: The Red Strings Between Launch
Performing & Visual Arts
Join us for the launch of Rachael Li Ming Chong’s debut pamphlet, The Red Strings Between (VERVE), alongside other poetry readings.
Rachael Li Ming Chong: The Red Strings Between Launch
Join Rachael Li Ming Chong at The Poetry Cafe for the launch of her debut pamphlet, The Red Strings Between (VERVE Poetry Press), with additional readings from Sara Aghani, Timothy Fox, Yanita Georgiva & Ellen McAteer.
The Red Strings Between explores the East Asian mythological belief of human connection through red string. Extending from our blood vessels through the unseen world, these strings are said to bind together people whose lives are destined to intertwine. While folklore speaks of enduring bonds that may tangle but never break, this work delves further, questioning the threads that have evolved beyond intersection. Is this where grief lies? A meditation on connection, displacement and loss, Rachael Li Ming Chong celebrates the arterial bonds we forge with one another, and contemplates the threads whose narratives swell solely in their endings.
‘These poems overflow with delicious language and abundant images, exploring the complexity of grief, identity and the perpetual search for self. A stunning, cinematic and inventive debut, expansive as the skies and oceans that shine within these pages.’ Cecilia Knapp
‘This is an astonishing debut work: intricate, kinetic, radiant. A garden teeming with life, a forest of atoms, a cityscape flooded with waves of light and air. This is a poet whose grip on language is both muscular and delicate; textural and spectral. Each poem generates small tremors that reverberate outwards from the object held in the speaker’s palm through the nerve endings, skin and stars, held together in a trembling web of red thread. I want to spend longer in Rachael Li Ming Chong’s iridescent world.’ Nina Mingya Powles
Rachael Li Ming Chong is a poet and teacher, based in London. She is a winner of The Poetry Archive’s WordView 2021 Competition and the 2023 Creative Future Writers’ Poetry Award. She is an alumna of the HarperCollins Author Academy and the London Library Emerging Writers Programme.
