AustLit

'Stories can have a determining power, the authority of the assumed and accepted narrative.

'We all have our own of course, and perhaps the capacity to imagine the stories of hypothetical others. In everyday life that might pass for empathy; in literature it can carry an edge of privilege and controversy. And in fact? In non-fiction?

'In this edition, a timely exploration framed by that great Australian woman of letters Alexis Wright, a long musing on the often vexed intersections between our first peoples and the narrative that explains and explores the Indigenous position in modern Australia. Whose stories are these to tell? Who owns this continuing tale?' (Editorial introduction)

'Neilsen’s intelligent, searching, and relentlessly contemporary poems in Wildlife of Berlin reveal a poet whose chief interest is transforming and challenging the way we see our human position in a world under ecological and ideological threat. At once philosophical and conversational, deadly serious and unerringly wry, these poems offer us forensically clear-eyed perspectives on subjects ranging from environmental degradation and the impending collapse of fragile ecosystems in the anthropocene, to unconventional and irreverent portraits of figures drawn from literature and politics and beyond. Neilsen’s poems are miraculously both deeply ethical and deeply comic; they surprise and delight with the irreverence of their critiques, while always keeping an eye on the tragic consequences of human folly. Above all, they ask us to sit still, to pay attention, to re-examine our basic precepts with equal measures of reason, wit, imagination and empathy. Wildlife of Berlin is a superbly crafted, incisive and urgent collection of new work from one of Australia’s most original poets, and deserving of the wide audience I am sure it will find. These are necessary poems for incendiary times.

- Sarah Holland-Batt'  (Publication summary)