THE EVENING PARTY is out now. ✉️
I am beyond excited to present THE EVENING PARTY after three years of conversing, eavesdropping, collecting, listening and questioning, fantasising & reminiscing. Then, writing, editing, sleeping on it, editing some more.
THE EVENING PARTY is to be read in one go, on holiday, in a café watching people, at night before bed, a poem a day... however you feel like it. It follows no rules, is a collection of different minds and stories, clustered in the same small space like the rest of us.
I shared the blurb and epigraphs last time here.
Here are my first two reviews on the book:
If her first poetry collection Seashore was a seabed sparkling with saltwater pearls, then Cao has, in The Evening Party, made of these pearls a necklace and hung them on the corner of an oil painting’s golden frame. This new collection of prose and poetry is strung differently, it feels like not just a window, but an opened one.The poems feel like sitting on the edge of a sofa on New Year’s Eve, drink in hand, laughter in your mouth and inner turmoil in your heart. – Sallie Lundh, Apricity
The Evening Party beautifully captures the many ways that people weave in and out of each other’s lives, leaving behind memories and questions that linger with us. You will pick up threads throughout the book of people living their separate lives, and how
their paths have crossed over the years. Cao paints vivid pictures of life’s mundanities in poems and prose that bubble with youth and wonder, yet ache with the memory of long-abandoned flames. The Evening Party invites you to revisit the past beneath tipsy moonlight and discover almost-forgotten stories that are both complex and tender.
– Jasmine S. Higgins, Mermaid Lungs
Thank you to everyone following my journey & reading along. Your support has always been unmatched & I'm honoured you're here.
Sounds brilliant, can't wait to read