AustLit

'The literariness of Aboriginal literatures has long been subject to, and the subject of, critical ambiguity. The qualifiers of ‘ language ’ and ‘ in English ’ have sublimated Aboriginal cultural and creative expression beneath the respective disciplines and problematics of anthropology and poetics. Although there have been several sincere and enriching collaborations between settler and Aboriginal peoples to bridge such divides, such as Paddy Roe, Stephen Muecke, and Krim Benterrak’s Reading the Country (1984), the condition of Australian critical discourses concerning Aboriginal literatures in, around, and in defiance of, ‘ language, ’ remains fraught territory. Recent works from female Murri, Goorie, and Koorie poets Ellen Van Neerven, Alison Whittaker, and Lorna Munro are expressions of agency and disobedience at the forefront of these exchanges.' (Introduction)

'Alison Whittaker's debut, the Black&Write! Indigenous Writing Fellowship winning Lemons in the Chicken Wire, is a triumph in wit, Subversive playfulness, and identity reclamation, creating a new praxis for indigenous, queer, feminist and rural poetics in forty-nine boundary-defying poems. Dedicated 'To the land, and those who grow from it,' the collection reads as a love-letter to the land, family, community, strong women, and the pain of growing up. Whittaker's experience as a Gomeroi woman, lesbian, academic, and as a family member in a rural town are poetically inextricable. Every deliberately chosen word and subversive tun reflects and honours this intersectionality.' (Introduction)

'Monster's Ink is, predominantly, a collection of prose poetry where the message is delivered in a powerfully direct and lyrically interrogative voice...' (Introduction)