The Red Strings Between explores the ancient East Asian philosophy of human connection through red string. Rooted in the belief that the heart and pinky finger are linked through the ulnar artery, these strings are said to extend out through the unseen world, binding people whose lives are destined to intertwine. While folklore speaks of enduring bonds that may tangle but never break, this work delves deeper, questioning the threads that have evolved beyond intersection. Is this where grief lies? A meditation on connection, displacement and loss, Rachael Li Ming Chong celebrates the arterial bonds we forge with one another, and contemplates the threads whose narratives swell solely in their endings.
 
‘These poems overflow with delicious language and abundant images, exploring the complexity of grief, identity and the perpetual search for self. A stunning, cinematic and inventive debut, expansive as the skies and oceans that shine within these pages.’  Cecelia Knapp
 
‘This is an astonishing debut work: intricate, kinetic, radiant. A garden teeming with life, a forest of atoms, a cityscape flooded with waves of light and air. This is a poet whose grip on language is both muscular and delicate; textural and spectral. Each poem generates small tremors that reverberate outwards from the object held in the speaker’s palm through the nerve endings, skin and stars, held together in a trembling web of red thread. I want to spend longer in Rachael Li Ming Chong’s iridescent world.’  Nina Mingya Powles