Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud, Lee Murray, The Cuba Press, 2024

from 婦 Woman

When you were born here in the land of the long white cloud, in the savage bushlands of New Zealand; when you were born at the turn of the century, you were a little strangeness, an alien olive strangeness with mysterious almond eyes.

You do not recall your mother, a woman of this country, because you were ripped from her post- partum. She is a stranger to you, because before you could protest you were taken by ship to the Middle Kingdom to dwell in the home of your ancestors. You were still a sapling then, when you were parted from your mother, uprooted from these moody bush-clad cloud-lands and carried across the sea to the golden country. You were one-part willow and one-part mānuka, an out-of-place unbelonging strangeness.

Your father had high hopes, though, that you might bloom pure and pink as a lotus, if only your feet were planted in the mud of the old country. A mysterious strangeness, you might yet become a golden landscape, if only you could be shaped and tended. You might even become a sacred penjing, a tiny landscape, grotesque yet beautiful. If only you could be contained.

my bonsai / cracks / the china tray

So you grow up in China, speaking the silk- slipper tongue of your father’s ancestors, your strangeness pinched and nipped and contained so you might become a golden filial daughter.

bush walk / pushing aside the mānuka

Lee Murray
From Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud

What a heart embracing collection this is. Such writing poise. Every line sings out with linguistic freshness, a feast of visual and aural conjunctions: “your heart shrivels to a rotting black walnut, the sweet sonata halts”. Every musical phrase leading to the jagged edge of living: “apples and flutes will always be parallel lines”. Every lyrical cadence twisting the blade: “the girl is a typhoon of want, a perfect symphony of longing”.

Lee draws upon: “the invisible Chinese fox women who came to make their home here in Aotearoa, who trod this cloud-land before me and who lived and died and suffered in these pages, though you are many and nameless, I want to thank you for allowing me to slip on your skulls, share in your lives and give voice to your stories.” from ‘Acknowledgements’

In her ‘Author note’, Lee admits the “poetry-prose work has been one of the most difficult pieces of writing I have ever completed, possibly because I was writing it during the global pandemic and was plagued with interruptions and anxiety, but also because as a New Zealand-born Chinese Pākehā, the tragedy of these narratives filled me with sadness and anger.”

Indeed. And out of this difficulty, out of this complicated and resonant stretch into the personal and the imagined, Lee has produced an extraordinary collection, a chorus of voices that will unsettle and unnerve and are utterly necessary to be heard. This is a book to be shared.

The reading

Lee reads from Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud

Lee Murray ONZM is a writer, editor, and poet from Aotearoa New Zealand, a Shirley Jackson Award and five-time Bram Stoker Award® winner, including for poetry for Tortured Willows. With more than forty titles to her credit, she holds a New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Fiction and is an Honorary Literary Fellow of the New Zealand Society of Authors. She is a judge of the 2025 World Fantasy Awards. Read more here

The Cuba Press page