AustLit

 (Publication summary)

(Publication summary)

'My grandmother was one of Australia's greatest novelists, my grandfather won the Victoria Cross for gallantry and my father was hounded all his life as a spy.

'This is a three generational story. It's about my life; it's about my father, Ric; it's about my grandparents, the writer Katharine Susannah Prichard and the war hero Hugo Throssell. It's a study of the psychology of spies and those who obsess about them, a narrative of guilt and innocence told through poetry, prose and historical documents. It's a tale from another time - but one with obvious relevance, given how regularly governments rely on fear and scapegoating today.

'Let me tell you what was done to my family.' (Publication summary)

'In this, her fifth poetry collection, Karen Throssell revisits similar links between the intensely domestic/ personal and the broader social and political worlds. But in The Dialectics of Rain there are not only new fields of interest – travel and place (Cuba, an Aboriginal settlement in the Northern Territory, and France); a wry and unflinching look at the generational phases of ‘love’; and a series on race and terrorism. The work also experiments with form in a series of ekphrastic poems (looking at the interconnection between poetry and art, music, pottery and film) and a number of longer collage poems which weave poetry and prose.'  (Publication summary)