At the Altar of Touch

by Gavin Yuan Gao

From the 2020 winner of the Thomas Shapcott Award comes a sophisticated, impressive and rich collection of poetry that unpacks the complexity of family, grief, and cross-cultural and queer identity.

These richly allusive poems weigh violence and tenderness, wound and cure, history and future. Boldly and tenderly, they balance loss and gain, adventure and quiet, as they hum to one another of love and loss. This is a scintillating and exhilarating collection from an accomplished and distinctive new voice.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Queer

128 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2022

Reviews

[cass · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

a beautifully written poetry collection about culture, queer identity, and grief. Gao exploits stylistic techniques and structural features powerfully, allowing them to create a collection of emotionally rich poems.

[Kobi · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s rare I click so well with the poetry collection but so much of this was absolutely gorgeous. It’s hard to believe that as I’m writing this, this book only has 11 ratings and 3 reviews on Goodreads. I urge everyone to pick this up, I promise it’s beautiful from start to finish.

[Jonathan Lissner · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the easiest 5 stars I’ve ever given, and I think this might be my favourite poetry collection…ever!

[Sam P · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is now my favourite book of poems. I didn't dislike any, and adored many. Self -Portrait as the Last Wounded Stag & Glass Boat, Glass Shore & Falling stood out as particularly beautiful.

[Alistair · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find it invidious to rate poetry; it is such an individual concern. Gavin Yuan Gao’s debut collection is I think quite outstanding. They have an acute eye for vivid and imaginative word pictures. Themes of loss, desire and memory inspire much of their poetry. Sometimes filtered through the lens of Chinese history and folklore, and often being the “outsider”. Here is is a poet that I can’t wait for their next work.

[Crystal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excerpts:

When the boy I’d loved in bashful secrecy finally touched

me & touched me & touched me until my body
            was a high bright whistle, I thought
This must be what it means, in English, to fall—eyes closed,

trusting the air to hold you as if it were your own
            flesh. Not the way Icarus fell—mid
-flight, mouth agape, betrayed by sun’s searing heat

as wax-tipped feathers streamed from his back
            like jet plane contrails. But the way
dusk once fell across pebbled path, shaded by curlicues

of azalea blooms, as I walked home each afternoon years
            ago, repeating out loud the day’s lesson:
The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain, so I could dream

at night of freefalling off my tongue’s steep cliff through
            perfect English & still, each morning,
I’d rise faithfully from death.

(from “Falling”)

—

Let me be antlers. Let me be lightning / branching jagged into sky. Let me be sky—

(from “Self-Portrait as the Last Wounded Stag”)

—

Nights shipwrecked / in nameless wanting

(from “Glass City Aubade”)

[Minh Hoang · Rating 4 out of 5]

Once again this review was of 2025 and overdue but eh. One thing I have noticed is that every single poetry collection I’ve read so far comes from the same publishing company of the University of Queensland Press, so shout of to Australia for outputting these awesome works. With the prefacing over, this one was a page turner. While Gao does play with the form and varies from entries to entries but it’s mainly the lack if rhymes (which I prefer) and the implementation of headings or rather the utilisation of space. I enjoyed the Asian representation of this text since it’s probably a first for me to read a poem that wasn’t of the West. Some standout pieces that are quite meta is the inevitable poem “COVID” alongside “For the Man on the Bus Who Told Me to Go Back to Where I Came From” where it twists this generalised racist comment towards Chinese people into beautiful poetry. Overall the collection was beautiful to read and there’s a certain sway behind the intricacy of the careful outlined proses and curated selection of gorgeous words with my favourite being “Requiem with a Singing Kimono” and Gao’s choice to implement subheadings within this entry - a choice I have yet to completely decipher from their part but that doesn’t stop me from thoroughly liking it despite not yet being able to discern exactly why. Perhaps it’s the way it has been worded… I’ll come back to it.

[Isabel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the poems. Gao expresses his sentiments in such a subtle way that I am deeply touched by his lines. Look forward to the next book!

[Pauline · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 Stars

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although I try to read widely and keep up on things, I'll admit that I don't have a lot of access to new poetry from Australia. The major figures will find their way into my reading (think Les Murray, for instance), but I've been lucky enough to have a few younger and newer Australian poets as students at Michigan,, and they have kept me informed.

One of the best of these young ones, was Gavin Yuan Gao, who I had when they were an undergraduate. After they finished here, they went back to Austalia, and then to their native China, to be with family during the Covid epidemic. Now they're back in the US doing an MFA at the Michner Center at the University of Texas. Between their two stays in America, they wrote this wonderful collection of poems. It won a big first book prize, and then won the Prime Minister's Prize, the Australian equivalent of the National Book Award.

Many of the poems deal with family, particularly with the early loss of their mother. There are poems of queer love, and a strong sense of the erotic runs through the book. There are poems of racism, particularly of racist anti-Chinese attacks during Covid. But best of all are the poems about language and language learning. Gavin came to English late (they were 14 when they first moved to Australia), and they have the love of the language that perhaps only a convert could have. Their language is textured and allusive, although seldom overly lush (and I'll admit that was a problem when they were an undergraduate).

Here's the beginning of one poem late in the book that gives a sense of the fraught relationship of this remarkable poet with our language:

I was thinking, how, despite years of dogged
practice, English is still the slick
winged serpent the dull flute of my tongue

has failed to charm: cracked syllables slithering
past a rein of pink muscle
into audible exoticness that marks me as alien

on this side of the planet. How I envy you native
speakers--your minds falling
into language like agile skinny-dippers diving

straight through water, your mind-bodies unimpeded
by the gravity of syntax.

[Chloe · Rating 4 out of 5]

While all the poems are beautiful, as is the collection, two things stuck out to me. Firstly, there seems to be remarkably little variation in the rhythmic patterns of the lines. They all follow similar rising and falling patterns repeated over and over again. In this sea of words, the specificity of any given poem or line tends to be lost. Perhaps that is the point, but it seems a strange choice in poetry, which is so often about drawing attention to words. Secondly, the imagery used tends to fold into other imagery before being given a chance to be built upon and resonate. Instead of images, I am left with strange impressionistic landscapes of sounds that the words have conjured. This is an extremely interesting effect that I wish was used with more variety or perhaps juxtaposed with some poems that delved into a particular image with more specificity or clarity. The whole effect is rather that of the remembrance of a dream. The bizarre certainty of the dream itself has gone, but the general impression of its landscape, its anxieties and demands, remains.

[Tamara]

I was expecting to love this collection a lot more than I did. This was just a case of me not connecting with a lot of the imagery and metaphors, but I'm sure it's the perfect collection for someone else!

[Adam · Rating 1 out of 5]

Didn’t really connect to the collection

[Courtney · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a stunning collection, I just didn't connect with it.