AustLit

'Chloe Wilson is the author of two books of poetry, The Mermaid Problem and Not Fox Nor Axe. The latter was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in 2015 and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award in 2016. Hold Your Fire is her first collection of short fiction, and it is an assured and original debut. Bringing together a series of flash-fictions with several longer narratives, it showcases a sharp-eyed intelligence and a finely-tuned ear for rhythm and tone.'  (Introduction)

'“They said: ‘Keep that boy at arm’s length’. But whose arm? The arm of an orangutan, a giant squid, a Tyrannosaurus rex?” These lines from Chloe Wilson’s short story collection Hold Your Fire could be a response to the standard advice given to girls on how to ward off unwanted sexual advances. It’s the kind of advice that puts the onus on victims, so that the body they’re trying to protect – their own – somehow, monstrously, becomes both predator and prey, a hostile, turbulent force that they must spend their entire lives keeping under tight control.' (Introduction)

'A series of beautifully controlled fictional voices and an exquisite sense of literary craft contribute to the dark magnificence of Chloe Wilson’s début collection of short stories, Hold Your Fire. This volume explores the strange and sometimes surprising abject horror that characterises the quotidian and the ordinary. The stories both examine and revel in the classically Kristevan abject realities of the body’s expulsions and the disgust that is often characteristic of social marginality. For example, the ‘poo phantom’ writes a ‘message in shit on the walls’; tampons wrapped in toilet paper are described as ‘bodies that needed to be shrouded for burial’; a character feels a ‘quiver down to the bowels, the rush that is equal parts excitement and dread’; another tries ‘to pass a kidney stone’; and two sisters try an ‘Expulsion Cure’, where the doctor asks how much they expel: ‘And how often? And what is the colour? The texture? … When you eat something – poppy seeds, say, or the skin on a plum – how long does it take to reappear?’' (Introduction)