AustLit

'Alison Whittaker's debut, the Black&Write! Indigenous Writing Fellowship winning Lemons in the Chicken Wire, is a triumph in wit, Subversive playfulness, and identity reclamation, creating a new praxis for indigenous, queer, feminist and rural poetics in forty-nine boundary-defying poems. Dedicated 'To the land, and those who grow from it,' the collection reads as a love-letter to the land, family, community, strong women, and the pain of growing up. Whittaker's experience as a Gomeroi woman, lesbian, academic, and as a family member in a rural town are poetically inextricable. Every deliberately chosen word and subversive tun reflects and honours this intersectionality.' (Introduction)

'‘Anamnesis,’ the first poem and section of Aden Rolfe’s brilliant philosophical poetry collection, refers to Plato’s concept of learning as a process of recovering knowledge from within.  This poem presents an initial simple supposition: “We who we are because of / what we remember,” which is then challenged and amended through Rolfe’s poetic interrogation in four sections. This poem introduces the settings—“coastlines and beaches / clearings and trails”—recurring through the collection, and the illusion of coherency, dependent on forgetting incongruities. It sets up the speaker and the addressee, their edited and untethered beings. Memory becomes “a range of values / not definitive states,” contemporary, relational, amendable, and always bittersweet. “They say we’re plural, post-memory / too old not to know / we should be playing what when / instead of / what if.’'  (Introduction)