51 Alterities

An incisive observer of Australian cultural life returns with a collection that satirically reimagines our era of chaos and chicanery.

'the republic of letters / a veritable la la land' writes Keri Glastonbury in 51 Alterities, a collection in which cacophony rhymes with simplicity, and device notifications rebound across the desert horizon. In her poems 'nepo boys are punching above their weight', haunted by the 'spectres of unreal estate'; 'the senate estimate's axe / falls in aggregates of joy' while 'budgies in their natural habitat' have 'no idea they are suburban pretty boys'.

Keri Glastonbury's previous collection Newcastle Sonnets was written as a riposte to Ted Berrigan's New York-based The Sonnets, and 51 Alterities began too as a loose adaptation, of British poet Sam Riviere's influential 2012 debut 81 Austerities. Riviere's collection was written in response to the impact of conservative UK austerity measures on the arts, and as a reconsideration of the function of poetry in the internet age. Wrestling with Antipodean 'alterity' more than ten years later, as a female queer poet a decade older than Riviere's millennial male, Glastonbury's 51 Alterities responds to the persistence of economic austerity, and to poetry's precarious place in a landscape dominated by billionaire tech bros and social media empires.