AustLit

(i) the chora and the semiotic order: Euclid's dog as exile-text?

'Jordie Albiston's Euclid's dog (2017) sets up formally experimental textual spaces into which the poet channels sublime affective arrivals. Perhaps this book of `too algorithmic poems' functions as a kind of geomancy, for indeed Euclid's dog `crack[s] ajar those tiny heavens' of connection and completion (8), and the book's great power lies in Albiston using form as a divining tool by which to explore apprehensions of an extralinguistic 'heavenly rush' (30). The eight forms in this collection emulate those cosmic physical structures first mapped in Elements, Euclid's utext, in which the ancient Greek writer establishes geometry as a branch of mathematics concerned with the commensurable properties of three-dimensional space. In Euclid's dog, Albiston treats language as a kind of architectonic material and, turning her attention towards topographies of incommensurable affect, bends her forms into metrically stabilised, computational functions. The result is no mere domestication; Albiston's chiming metaphysics finally recounts love as a wild and profoundly generative creative force.  (Introduction)