Launch: Susan Hawthorne's Dark matters

Dark Matters mobilises a poetics of the fragment, as does so much of the work of Francophone lesbian poets Monique Wittig and Nicole Brossard, to draw constant attention to the lacunae in history, culture and language, where holes have been blown out of memory, where lesbians have lived and made love, cultures practised, poems composed, songs sung and dances danced. This work knows that writing grows a lace to configure the blank page; that its purpose is to allow these tracts of silence to bear witness, to accommodate the phantom wounds, the stigmata in palimpsest, the ravages of wilful violence and cultural wipe-out, a torn lace at that, its edges, its trailing threads, signalling gaping fissures, where the missing have been cast to oblivion.