AustLit

'In the opening poem of Rallying, Quinn Eades quotes the French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray: ‘Call yourself. Give, yourself, names.’ then presents us with a fourteen-page poem in which the poet moves swiftly, however fragmentedly, from a little girl who cares for her sister, to a heroin addict and sex worker, to a male writer. There are other identities, too, that fall in between, each as crisply visualised as the one before. It’s called ‘How to disappear in your name’, and it’s an adapted form of haibun, where memories are a rush of prose, and reflections in short-stanza verse follows. And it’s stunning. It’s closely aligned with Eades’s fictocritical(ish) 2015 debut prose work, all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body, a book of non-fictive feminist poetics, a highlight of my reading last year. They were written side by side and they cover the same territory, but rather than see Rallying as a new way to write all the beginnings, I see it as a new way to write the body: the body as child, the used and addicted body, the mothering body which has its foundations in the female birthing and therefore the nourishing and giving body, the body in love, the trans body. In a single poem, which, unlike the rest of the poems in the book is not bracketed by a titled section but stands alone as its own body, so to speak, Eades paints the person who held each name, and each name comes together to culminate in ‘Quinn’, and in Quinn.' (Introduction)