Dropbear

by Araluen, Evelyn

• ISBN13: 9780702263187
• ISBN10: 0702263184
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2024-05-07
• Publisher: University of Queensland Press

Summary

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

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

Author Biography

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. Evelyn's debut collection Dropbear was shortlisted for the 2021 Judith Wright Calanthe Award for a Poetry Collection and the 2022 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, and won the 2022 Stella Prize.

Table of Contents

GATHER GATHER 2 The Ghost Gum Sequence 4 Learning Bundjalung on Tharawal 8 SUBURB PARATEXT 10 Bastards from the Bar 11 Index Australis 12 PYRO 14 Malay 16 Playing in the Pastoral 19 Dropbear Poetics 21 The Last Endeavour 23 SPECTRE Acknowledgement of Cuntery 30 The Trope Speaks 32 Guarded by Birds 34 To the Poets 36 decolonial poetics (avant gubba) 39 Concessions 40 Bad Taxidermy 41 Bread 43 Stutter 44 Moving Day 46 With Hidden Noise 48 Mrs Kookaburra Addresses the Natives 50 Hold 52 In Fright 54 DEBRIS Dirge 56 To the Parents 57 Wangal Morning 61 Home, After the Fire 62 The Inevitable Pandemic Poem 64 Bahloo 66 K1: Yellomundee 68 THE INLAND SEA 69 Fern Up Your Own Gully 74 Boab 76 Breath 77 FOMO 82 Secret River 84 Appendix Australis 85 Unreckoning 91 FOR POWER FOR PRAYER FOR PROMISE FOR PEACE 92 See You Tonight 94 THE LAST BUSH BALLAD 95 Notes 99 Acknowledgements 102