Bringing forward a luminous, intimate exploration of the Chinese Australian experience, Questions I’m Scared to Ask at Parties navigates questions of femininity, desire, love, filial piety, and cultural identity. The collection draws from the traditional Chinese concept of mian zi, or ‘saving face’, and is steeped in the pain of inherited silences, self-censorship and cultural anxieties around womanhood. However, such silences are always couched side by side with subversiveness, survival, and hard-won joy, surfacing in each poem through unexpected images—a cooked trout, a field of white snow, mango cakes. Hybrid in form and experimental in content, the collection asks the reader to contemplate the limitations of the English language on colonised land: ‘In another life, I would still have words, / but not these words.’ Questions I’m Scared to Ask at Parties deftly weaves together the emotional, the domestic, and the political, introducing a vital new voice to Australian poetry.