AustLit

'Shastra Deo’s writing effortlessly transcends cultural rifts, striving from modernist allusion through indulgent fan fiction and out into something entirely unique. I met Shastra first via Instagram, then conducted our interview in a Google Doc over several months, spaced out to allow for other freelance work, literature festivals or burnout. Despite being the outcome of her PhD, her second book, The Exclusion Zone, brims with an unexpected bloodlust and spectral force. To my personal delight, her poems demand we expand our conception of what is deemed literature, reminding us how poetry draws so much of its potency from its rich network of connections.' (Introduction)

'The idea is to compose a whole book by speaking it. Spoken on Barkindji and Nyemba Country by a Barkindji elder, academic and poet (Paul Collis), in dialogue with two white poet-academics (Jen Crawford, Paul Magee) and five local Barkindji, Kunya and Nyemba interlocutors (Gertie Dorigo, Bradley Hardy, Margaret Knight, Wayne Knight, Brian Smith), taped and transcribed, A Book that Opens provides a book-based archive of oral intellectual practice on Country along the Darling / Baarka River in outback New South Wales.' (Introduction)

'Maybe we’ll always disagree about poetry – about how it works, and what it’s for; about its modalities and affordances; about what makes a good poem; about why you might want to write or read one. For as long as anyone can remember, the poetry scene has been characterised by clashing opinions. In this bewildering proliferation of disagreements, the sheer existence of bad poems offers a rare point of consensus. For as we all know, bad poems exist. I’ve read them. You’ve read them. Some of us might even have written a few. And we can all agree they suck. That there are bad poems is a critical fact so empirically incontestable as to verge on the axiomatic. It is as if, in our efforts to come to grips with poetry, we have here – at last! – touched on something irrefragable, recalcitrant, certain.' (Introduction)

'When I first read this book, I was taken aback by all the foxes, deer, and horses. These types of animals seemed cringy, stereotypical, Disney. Why isn’t she talking about kangaroos or koalas? I thought. Native animals have more weight, more depth, more inflections. After reading it again, I realised it was me being cringe, pretending as if colonisation didn’t happen, as if I wasn’t white—a little princess—as if I wasn’t really a person and I didn’t really exist.' (Introduction)