Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Poetry

DROPBEAR

Evelyn Araluen

This fierce debut from award-winning writer Evelyn Araluen confronts the tropes and iconography of an unreconciled nation with biting satire and lyrical fury.

I told you this was a thirst so great it could carve rivers.

Dropbear interrogates the complexities of colonial and personal history with an alternately playful, tender and mournful intertextual
voice, deftly navigating the responsibilities that gather from sovereign country, the spectres of memory and the debris of settler-coloniality. This innovative mix of poetry and essay offers an eloquent witness to the entangled present, an uncompromising provocation of history, and an embattled but redemptive hope for a decolonial future.

Evelyn Araluen is a poet, researcher and co-editor of Overland Literary Journal. Her widely published criticism, fiction and poetry has been awarded the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, a Wheeler Centre Next Chapter Fellowship, and a Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund grant. Born and raised on Dharug country, she is a descendant of the Bundjalung Nation.

Available products
Book Published 2021-03-01 by UQP University of Queensland Press - St Lucia (AUS)

Comments

The book's distinguishing factor is the playful and acerbic manner in which the Indigenous writer points out how Australian kitsch, flora and fauna, and beloved bush ballads are a far more dominant trope in our culture than the lasting realities of settler politics and violence.

In this collection, Evelyn Araluen lovingly honours ancestors and country, while she relearns the Aboriginal languages of place and home... Throughout, her voice rises and falls like the landscape, her sentences carve the page like rivers, and her words burn a pattern across time like fire.

Superb... essential reading for anyone interested in 'Australian' poetics or politics.

A remarkable collection; smart, thoughtful and articulate.

For many readers, this will open up the exciting possibilities of blending poetry, memoir and theory, and it makes for a great book club choice. Araluen is a poet I'll be keeping my eye on, and Dropbear a collection I'll return to.

A wide-ranging and memorable collection, filled with empathy, pride and beautiful language.

In Dropbear, her debut collection of poetry, Evelyn Araluen wields a scalpel through twinkly visions and phantasma that treat the Australian landscape as empty necropolis.

Dropbear is an eloquent and powerful mix of poetry and essay imbued with redemption that needs to be experienced.