Hello! I’m Rhea, a poet, writer, devourer of books and sweet things based in Sydney, Australia.
Rhea’s forthcoming poetry collection, ‘Questions I’m Scared to Ask at Parties’ (Vagabond Press) will be published in September 2026. Her work has appeared in the Cordite Poetry Review and The Australian Poetry Journal. She lives, works, plays, and creates on Dharug land with her husband and spicy ginger kitten.
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.
“What stands out in this collection is the sound of a unique and compelling poetic voice. Emerging poets often have the beginnings of what will become their singular tone but in a more tentative register. There is nothing tentative about Cai. She writes with the ferocity and conviction of a poet in full command of her craft. I have no doubt she is a writer who will quickly establish herself as a key voice in Australian and international poetry and whose work we will be reading for many years to come.”
Poetry
A Name Crossed out on a List — Australian Poetry Journal 14.2 (2026)
Soup — Cordite Poetry (2019)
Other
Review: Know Your Place — The Politics of Identity at Sydney Writers’ Festival — Honi Soit (2019)
Take Me to Church — Honi Soit (2018)
Somewhere Only We Know — Honi Soit (2018)
Reading Ruined Me — Honi Soit (2017)