AustLit

Author's note: i.m. Lucas North

'When someone walks along our street, the dogs bark from behind their fences like a choreographed Mexican wave that travels from one end of the road to another. I know the sound and rhythm of the dogs well. I know when something is urgent and when it's not. But I don't know my neighbours' names. We smile and wave politely in passing, but that's about the limit of our interaction on this quiet street in this small town. Less than a kilometre away, where my sister-in-law lives, things are quite different. The dogs aren't locked up behind fences because the gates are always open and the dogs never run away. My sister-in-law knows the names of her neighbours. She also knows the names of her neighbours' parents and grandparents, their children and most of their grandchildren. Migrants in Australia, those of us that have arrived at different points in the last 230 years, can only dream nostalgically about that depth of community. The reasons for this can in part be traced back to government policies that have designated where and how particular people live, especially so in this town. ' (Introduction)
 

'I came to this ancient city of child emperors, tea wars, and men who stare down tanks, hoping fossils from the Flaming Cliffs of the Mongolian Gobi might have made their way to the People's capital.' (Introduction)

'I pretend today is any old day but it's not - I know the baby is coming. 

'Giving voice to the voiceless implies a sensuality, an embodied-ness that reaches into the skin and sinew of the past. For a voice to speak it must manifest lips, throat, tongue - tactile mouth-feel. It must draw breath in and push it out. It must seize life.' (Introduction)

(i) the chora and the semiotic order: Euclid's dog as exile-text?

'Jordie Albiston's Euclid's dog (2017) sets up formally experimental textual spaces into which the poet channels sublime affective arrivals. Perhaps this book of `too algorithmic poems' functions as a kind of geomancy, for indeed Euclid's dog `crack[s] ajar those tiny heavens' of connection and completion (8), and the book's great power lies in Albiston using form as a divining tool by which to explore apprehensions of an extralinguistic 'heavenly rush' (30). The eight forms in this collection emulate those cosmic physical structures first mapped in Elements, Euclid's utext, in which the ancient Greek writer establishes geometry as a branch of mathematics concerned with the commensurable properties of three-dimensional space. In Euclid's dog, Albiston treats language as a kind of architectonic material and, turning her attention towards topographies of incommensurable affect, bends her forms into metrically stabilised, computational functions. The result is no mere domestication; Albiston's chiming metaphysics finally recounts love as a wild and profoundly generative creative force.  (Introduction)