Bella Li, 3 Book Bundle
Catch up on the career the Ian Potter Creative Fellow 2025 for Poetry, Bella Li.
This bundle combines Bella Li's three full-length award-winning collections: Argosy (2017), Lost Lake (2018), and Theory of Colours (2021).
'Bella Li’s Argosy is a stunning hybrid artefact, textually and visually. Through Argosy, Li provokes the reader on the value of the object, of the book. This is a collection whose very reality insists on the necessity of print – it dwells within the materiality of form, and is a recognition of poetry as art and art as poetry. Argosy’s exquisite writing leads the reader through collages, prose poetry and photography, the meanings of which unfold through their juxtapostions – poetic gaps that spur haunting, dreamlike sequences. This is a collection of journeys and intertextual dialogues – between poems and works, and with culture and history.' Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2018 judges' report.
'The powerful and surprising impact of the book made Argosy a clear winner. Bella Li’s sophisticated handling of language, form, time and image offers a remarkable synthesis of European surrealism and an antipodean sensibility, via a Chinese–Australian history. This important contribution to Australian poetic imagination and traditions doubles as a Southern Hemisphere rewriting and re-imaging of world traditions.' NSW Premier's Award (Poetry) judges' report.
'Lost Lake is a lush hybrid of prose poetry, collage and photography, forming what is one of the most beautifully produced poetry titles of recent times. Expansive and imaginative, Li challenges the possibilities of the medium; Lost Lake is an adventure in form, where the book’s design is as poetic as the text it contains. A poetic travelogue of sorts, the book journeys constantly between the poetic and the visual in a narrative that takes on and repurposes the tropes of colonial exploration in order to tell a different, multi-valent story. There are funfairs, hothouses, and green houses. There are lost lakes. Li’s prose poems bely their slick forms; the voice is assured and sophisticated, even though many sentences are charged fragments from her source texts. Hovering underneath text and image alike is a devotion to what has been lost, to its recovery through expansion into the surreal. Positioned at the interstices of the subliminal and the known, the work reveals absences in time and space that soon we long to inhabit.' (From the QLD Prize judges' report)
'With Theory of Colours, Li has levelled up the uncanny. Unnerving collages with gothic overtones give way to prose poems that are a tissue of references. The empty spaces of abandoned hotels and national parks, devoid of human life, create a sense of dislocation, and haunting. While nearly two years of lockdowns may or may not have shaped the artistic choices here, it is impossible not to associate these collages with the eerie, blank streets of our empty cities.' Joan Flemming in Australian Book Review
Bella Li is a writer, artist, designer, and editor. She has published three hybrid books of poetry and visual art: Argosy, Lost Lake, and Theory of Colours, with Vagabond Press.
Her work has won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, the NSW Literary Award for Poetry, and an Australian Book Designers Association Award for book design; and has been shortlisted or commended in the Queensland Literary Award for Poetry, the Anne Elder Award, and the Wesley Michel Wright Prize.
Li has made work in collaboration with visual artists, sound artists, and musicians, and has been commissioned by institutions including the National Gallery of Victoria, Heide Museum of Modern Art, the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
She holds a PhD in creative writing from The University of Melbourne and was recently in residence at the BR Whiting Studio in Rome and a featured artist at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival.