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'Madrid, Spain 2019. The end of the UN Climate Change Conference--another moral failure on the part of those who could have made change. I go back to the labour union hall that all the activist groups have been using as a headquarters to help with the clean-up. There are only a few of us left. I take on the communal kitchen and bin heads of broccoli gone to dusty seed and half-used jars of slimy lima beans. I wash towers of greasy plastic cups with cold water and floor cleaner, because that's all there is. The door to the room that held the expensive sound equipment has been broken--no, not just broken, but thoroughly smashed. There is talk of a missing key, something lost in translation. The word 'smithereens' comes to mind.
'In a back room littered with cardboard and paint tins, I find a giant papier-mache head of a grandmother that First Nations activists fashioned for their part in the climate march. Alone in the echoing halls, it feels like silence and time are demanding something of me--an act of great care--though I don't know how to rise to it. The crisis is upon us, but abstraction is a bulwark; deafness, everywhere. We have come to an edge. I want to find a way of taking the truth into my body, and then putting it down into the ground. From somewhere offstage, a misery of voices starts to murmur in the scrounge. What starts up is a grief work. I wrap the grandmother head in a pall of plastic sheeting and carry it across the city to Desperate Literature bookshop in the rain.' (Publication summary)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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All Futures Are Possible
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , December 2022;
— Review of Song of Less 2022 selected work poetry ; Every Version of You 2022 single work novel'Early in Grace Chan’s novel Every Version of You, Tao-Yi and her partner Navin pass a monument erected at Melbourne’s Federation Square that commemorates the deaths caused by a US airstrike in 2041 – the attack, by now, a distant memory. At one point in Joan Fleming’s verse novel Song of Less, a character called Cousin Groundpigeon says ‘Remember countries?’ ' (Introduction)
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Dystopic Presents and Futures : Two Disquieting Verse Novels
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , May no. 442 2022; (p. 43-44)
— Review of Song of Less 2022 selected work poetry ; Blight Street . 2021 selected work poetry 'In the years since Les Murray’s The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (1980) and Alan Wearne’s The Nightmarkets (1986), the verse novel has become, despite its inherent difficulties, an established literary form in Australian poetry (and fiction, for that matter). Verse novelist Dorothy Porter (1954–2008), with The Monkey’s Mask (1994) and other works, gave it further prominence. Steven Herrick is just one of the poets who are making it an important part of the Young Adult field. A series of interviews with Australasian verse novelists (The Verse Novel), edited by Linda Weste, has recently gone into a second edition.' (Introduction)
-
Dystopic Presents and Futures : Two Disquieting Verse Novels
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , May no. 442 2022; (p. 43-44)
— Review of Song of Less 2022 selected work poetry ; Blight Street . 2021 selected work poetry 'In the years since Les Murray’s The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (1980) and Alan Wearne’s The Nightmarkets (1986), the verse novel has become, despite its inherent difficulties, an established literary form in Australian poetry (and fiction, for that matter). Verse novelist Dorothy Porter (1954–2008), with The Monkey’s Mask (1994) and other works, gave it further prominence. Steven Herrick is just one of the poets who are making it an important part of the Young Adult field. A series of interviews with Australasian verse novelists (The Verse Novel), edited by Linda Weste, has recently gone into a second edition.' (Introduction) -
All Futures Are Possible
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , December 2022;
— Review of Song of Less 2022 selected work poetry ; Every Version of You 2022 single work novel'Early in Grace Chan’s novel Every Version of You, Tao-Yi and her partner Navin pass a monument erected at Melbourne’s Federation Square that commemorates the deaths caused by a US airstrike in 2041 – the attack, by now, a distant memory. At one point in Joan Fleming’s verse novel Song of Less, a character called Cousin Groundpigeon says ‘Remember countries?’ ' (Introduction)
Awards
- 2023 highly commended Victorian Premier's Literary Awards — Prize for Poetry