Home, Away, Elsewhere, a collection of poems by Asia Writes's featured writer Vaughan Rapatahana, is due to be published by Proverse Press in Hong Kong. Vaughan was a semi-finalist in the inaugural Proverse Prize in Literature in 2009 and this collection contains many of the poems from that entry. It also contains poems first published on Asia Writes.Early Praises:
Vaughan Rapatahana's poems make significant patterns out of the randomness of life's events and give succinct and effective voice to the peculiarly modern condition of the global nomad at once home everywhere and home nowhere. - David Eggleton, Editor of Landfall, Aotearoa-New Zealand.
…poems with attitude. … passionate, uncompromising and sardonic. …there is darkness here … also wit in abundance and a playfulness in language and thought … at times laugh-out-loud funny…. a compelling voice and Vaughan uses it skilfully to tell us his stories, make his often pungent points, and take us places few of us have seen. - James Norcliffe, Robert Burns Fellow (2000), Aotearoa-New Zealand.
In Home, Away, Elsewhere Vaughan Rapatahana promises the deep irony/ absurdity/ reality of the new century, where home is really elsewhere and elsewhere is indeed a sort of home. ... These poems are pieces of an intricately interlinked multi-cultural and multi-lingual world, in which the poet must learn to live. In fact the poet relishes this confusing richness. His verses celebrate the graphic possibility of words, their visual appearance and sounds. So one must come to them with big eyes, big ears and a limitless imagination. - Muhammad Haji Salleh, National Laureate, Malaysia.
Get updates on the release of the book at the Proverse website or at Amazon.
