AustLit

'Jake Goetz's second poetry collection, Unplanned Encounters: Poems 2015-2020, presents a personal poetic ecology that revels in the intimacies of the everyday. Broken into three parts, the first section, 'Ash in Sydney', wades through the smoked-out cityscape of Sydney during the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfire season: an environmental disaster that led to the estimated death of one billion animals. Interrogating humanity's implication in these fires, the poet reflects on the cataclysmic event as but another chapter in the ecocidal narrative of Australia's colonial-capitalist project. The second section, 'The Cobalt Blues', presents a series of New York School-esque works written while the poet lived and worked in Sydney and Brisbane (2016-18). Scrolling through urban places and online spaces, these poems critique the métro-boulot-dodo of daily life in a world where the swipe of a finger can reveal children working '12-hour days / in Congolese mines / to provide the cobalt / for phone batteries' ('The cobalt blues'). The last section, 'Unplanned Encounters', compiles a selection of poems written in 2015 into a fragmented travelogue: taking the reader through an array of locales and subjects, from a rumination on love by the Pearl River in Guangzhou, China, to a jetlagged morning at LA's Venice Beach; from savouring a snowy night in Vienna, to a reflection on the history of coca in La Paz, Bolivia. A celebration of backpacking bohemianism yet also a criticism of this very privilege, these works trace a young poet coming to terms with the poetics and politics of a planetary home.' (Publication summary)