AustLit

'Contemporary Australian poet Gig Ryan’s early work explores lyric romance between zombie-like subjects and survivors. Bringing the zombie into contact with the lyric, this work raises questions about how the subject feels their transition into posthuman states of being in Anthropocene neoliberalism. Often neglected from discussions of zombie capitalism, poetry written in the 1970s and 1980s presents anxieties that existed for the first generation of youth culture in neoliberalist late capitalism. Ryan’s punk, anti-ballad confrontations with the Orphic lyric such as the well-known poem “If I Had a Gun” indict its alignment with a broader metaphysics of dead bodies lyricised in romantic code. As a result, by her mid-career period, Ryan has developed a Eurydicean counter-lyric in which the lyric speaker assails the violence of patriarchal romance, and the masculine-feminine divisions that sustain it, through post-punk negativity.'

Source: Abstract.

'Acclaimed poet Corey Wakeling’s second collection continues his inquiry into language and the spatial architectures of history and culture. Set among 20th century ruins, the poems are cast as if hallucinations: colonial-style houses are ‘guarded by palm trees’, Royal Park ‘detains two immoveable statues’ while the ‘Wheel of Fortune dizzies’. The poems range throughout Melbourne and Western Australia, where the poet has lived, and further afield too. Strong in its deployment of baroque imagery and modernist citation, The Alarming Conservatory uniquely captures the fear and pace of our contemporary condition.'  (Publication abstract)