AustLit

‘Freyberg’s sexy landscape is the Kings Cross of queer history; a dream/memoir, sharply observed, calling full blast from an era bulldozed and broken. Liquid with desire, brutal and beautiful, in all the drawn-out tenderness maturity brings.’ - Kerri Shying

‘The Crumbling Mansion really rips down the page. It’s a series of interrelated snapshots and vignettes that read like mini chapters in a verse novella. The poems are tactile and visceral and conjure well a scene: the crumbling mansion is a gothic pile of many rooms - art, wine, philosophy and music; a burgeoning, blossoming, sweaty, yearning sexuality and desire for long denied and luridly painted fruit. There’s the shadow of AIDS and the shadow of fathers: anxiety and a desperate desire to fill an identity and madly misspend a lost youth.

'Underpinning it all is the grounding respite and hope of art, and the salvation and identity to be found in artistic creation. There are also some delicate and finely painted pieces of the natural world.’ - Tug Dumbly'

Source : publication summary