AustLit

'FIFTEENERS IS THE latest stunning installment in this storied poet’s fearless oeuvre, and Jordie Albiston’s book of strangest deformations of the sonnet form traverses “all the life / That an awkward person must go through in / The awkward course toward death.” In the first poem, an ars poetica and apologia, Albiston mimics an Elizabethan diction to reassert the privilege of affect over intellect: “Poetry may / be loved but never thought by love it may / be gotten holden but by thought nay so,” and that love is a paramountcy remains amply evidenced across this poet’s extensive catalog. Her books on love (Element; Euclid’s Dog: 100 Algorythmic Poems; The Book of Ethel) and its multiple modes of atrophy (Warlines; Jack & Mollie [& Her]; Vertigo: A Cantata) suggest that affective modalities—or is it the quest from disequilibrium toward idealized states—have long determined the impetus of this prolific and widely admired writer. (Introduction)