AustLit

'The bag of drugs is sitting untouched on the kitchen bench beside the cans of diced tomatoes and chickpeas I’d earlier quarantined. They – cans not drugs – may be useful, I think, although in less apocalyptic times, I might prefer to soak dried chickpeas to make hummus or chana masala. The chickpea glut follows a 9pm masked assault of Harris Farm Leichhardt and the fact the ex has recently turned up unannounced with a care package of more canned pulses, organic brown rice and greens than I have room to store. An Amma devotee never known to hug spontaneously, he’d stood at the mandated distance of one Kylie Minogue on the other side of my gate (less gateless gate than gate that never shuts properly, the broken latch, I observed as he handed me the box, one of the ten thousand things now unlikely to be repaired…).' (Introduction)

'A friend and I are fans of Nick Cave’s iconoclastic band of the early 1980s The Birthday Party. Part of our enjoyment is that we find Cave’s vocal and lyrical posturing hilarious at times. In songs like ‘Release The Bats’ and ‘Hamlet (Pow Pow Pow)’ his shrieks are both terrifying and absurd. At such moments, my friend will occasionally address the stereo with something like, ‘you’re not fooling anyone Nick, we know you’re a good private schoolboy!’' (Introduction)

'Before we’d finished scattering the ashes of trees after the bushfires, a pandemic folded us inside with our grief and confusion and sourdough. Soon enough, poetry started to float out through the windows, across our screens and social media, as if a salve for isolation. Inevitably, when the world is too difficult to describe we turn to poetry, arguably our oldest form of literature, ‘to explain the unexplainable’, as Bruce Pascoe says in Extinction Elegies. Poems speak to us through panic and fences, closed doors, forests, rivers and distanced days. Their atoms lodge somewhere within us and we carry them close, hoping that, in the inferno of loss and uncertainty, the intensity and ambiguity of poetry can salvage something. Whether it’s a memory, a way of undoing the world, the remnants of a life, a new relationship, a forest or community, poems connect us by distilling the personal and universal. So what’s the social impact of poetry in the midst of a pandemic?' (Introduction)

'This conversation took place over the summer of 2020/21. We were looking for a new way to discuss, to essay about, speculative fiction. Should we write each other letters? Emails? We talked on the phone and started writing/overwriting a shared googledoc, extending our edits into a conversation that teased out ideas – asking and answering, testing and challenging each other. Wow, we thought, is that what you think. Okay…' (Introduction)

'As an immigrant who came to this country from rural Punjab at the age of ten, I have never quite understood the need to feel Australian. I wince at the assimilationist rhetoric of this settler-colony. I am at home in my language – its untranslatability delights me – which gives weight to my being in the world. My mentor, the anthropologist Kalpana Ram, once recalled saying to the radical feminists at the University of Sydney in the 70s, ‘going home feels like taking off a tight shoe, it’s the only place where I can speak my own language, eat my own food.’ Ram’s words made me wonder, what would the abolition of the nuclear family mean for us women of colour? Those of us who find refuge only in those heterosexual spaces of reproduction. I have always been suspicious of liberal white feminism and its appropriation of the language of intersectionality, with its myriad challenges to the linear teleology of equality that posits a project with a culmination – a tidy ending.' (Introduction)