'A confronting and powerful novel from an exciting new voice - for lovers of Christos Tsiolkas (Loaded) and Luke Davies (Candy).
'He touched my face. When his hand went along my bruised top lip and my almost broken nose, I winced from the pain. His fist went into a deep denim pocket. Pulled out a Syrinapx bottle, twisted the cap off and handed me two light blue pills.'
'How did Bucky get here? A series of accidents. A tragic love for a violent man. An addiction to painkillers he can't seem to kick. An unlikely friendship with an ageing patient.
'Drugs, memories and the objects of his desire are colluding against Bucky. And when it hits him. Bam. A ton of bricks ...
'The shadowy places of Western Sydney can be lit up with the hope of love, but no streetlight can illuminate like obsession.
'A novel of addiction, secrets and misplaced love, this is an Australian debut not to be missed.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'There is not a simple matter of homogenous ‘queer’ voice, literary or otherwise (Hurley, 2010). As poststructuralist theorists have contended, for various historical and social reasons, ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ are discursively unstable and contested categories (Jagose, 2002) and homosexuality is ‘a performative space of contradiction’ (Sedgwick , 1990). In highlighting Polites’ engagement through his noir, i.e. of the thornier breaches of the queer-racial diaspora, I seek to explore the ideals behind his proposed definitive ‘queer’. Are bodies racialised erotically? Can queer love be normative? The answers to these questions, as the chapters of Down The Hume have argued, is yes, and the implication is that a radical tension and a central paradox is characteristic—are queer relationships driven by sex?—and perhaps even definitional—of the very term “queer” (Sedgwick, 1990).’' (Introduction)
'This article takes an autobiographical approach to explore the changes that have occurred in Australian suburbia over the past twenty years. It considers two key queer texts—Christos Tsiolkas’s Loaded (1995) and Peter Polites’s Down the Hume (2017)—and the manner in which the protagonists of these novels express their class and sexuality in their respective suburbanscapes. Published more than twenty years apart, I argue that the process of queering Australian suburbia that can be read in both novels opens up a space to reimagine how class, ethnic and sexual mobility is negotiated in contemporary Australia.' (Publication abstract)
'There is not a simple matter of homogenous ‘queer’ voice, literary or otherwise (Hurley, 2010). As poststructuralist theorists have contended, for various historical and social reasons, ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ are discursively unstable and contested categories (Jagose, 2002) and homosexuality is ‘a performative space of contradiction’ (Sedgwick , 1990). In highlighting Polites’ engagement through his noir, i.e. of the thornier breaches of the queer-racial diaspora, I seek to explore the ideals behind his proposed definitive ‘queer’. Are bodies racialised erotically? Can queer love be normative? The answers to these questions, as the chapters of Down The Hume have argued, is yes, and the implication is that a radical tension and a central paradox is characteristic—are queer relationships driven by sex?—and perhaps even definitional—of the very term “queer” (Sedgwick, 1990).’' (Introduction)