AustLit

'An Australian National law has been passed and a group known as the Asbestos Task Force (A.T.F.) is formed by the government to systematically remove all known asbestos from towns, cities and suburbs. The city of Perth, Western Australia and surrounds have undergone this removal, and gradually the task force spreads further afield into the South West. Their target has reached Farmbridge, an old pioneer town with numerous asbestos houses and buildings. Newly married, May and Isaac who plan to renovate their home, an old Girl Guide Hall, experience the imminent threat of losing their home after receiving their fateful letter. Believing their home is not made from asbestos, the couple set out on a relentless quest to save the hall from demolition.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Helen Hagemann’s lines crackle with the energy of an arch observer. Although she often looks back, her nostalgia is an honest squaring with the world that never lets metaphor too easily ‘glaze’ a thing. And what a dense material world it is. These poems burst with a dazzling record of things that both tenderly and wryly evoke other decades and, in doing so, other ways of living. Her uncompromising yet generous eye balances an openness to fragility with the ‘red combustion of our lives’. - LUCY DOUGAN' (Publication summary)