Pagination
1-73ISBN-13
9780648534334Language
engResearch statement
Background
This collection is in conversation with the poet’s traditional scholarly work on time, silence, absence, memory, the conditions for transformation and event. It takes up provocations from 20th century French philosophy, namely accounts of time and repetition in Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson and draws on Alain Badiou’s conceptions of both the event and subjectivation. A number of poems work ekphrastically with works by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin and Hokusai, as well as the writings of Sebald and Foster Wallace.
Contribution
This collection seeks to excavate and complicate the notion of uncertainty and not-knowing, as these play out in various temporal registers: the anticipated present, the elusive and expansive past and the empty, pure form of time known as future. Poems both remember times—self-reflexively dipping into the archive of the insisting past—as well as create new times, via formal techniques of enjambment, rhythm, spacing and repetition. The aphoristic title signals the collection’s radical commitment to holding open what is not certain, in the effort to prevent preclusions of genuine futurity and gaps where desire gets in and can move. Extending work on the concep
Significance
The work was short-listed for the national ASAL Mary Gilmore Award for new poets, and endorsed by poet and critic, Lisa Gorton (PhD). The work generated two launches (one as part of the Emerging Writers’ Festival 2020), and a pod-cast interview in Poetry Says. A review, noting the feminist and emancipatory commitments of the work, claimed that the poems contain ‘the best sex positions ever written in the English language’, and that its femininity, belying Kristeva, is ‘abjectless’.Publication classification
J1 Major original creative workPublisher
Rabbit PoetryPlace of publication
Melbourne, VIc.Series
Rabbit Poets Series; no.13
