Otopos

Otopos unfurls a paradox: the interleaving and entangling

of self and topos. It began with a loss of equilibrium

impelling rhythmic departures, an incipient blood beat--

subcutaneous, through the feet all the way to the surface

of the page. A Belgian native, I live and write on unceded

Wurundjeri land in an inner-city suburb of Melbourne.

This makes me a paradox. An unsettled European out

of place in a neighbourhood she calls home with its

fenced, stolen and, too often, desecrated land. Who bears

witness to political abstractions and aberrations yet fails

to wholly reimagine or rematerialize these through poetry

despite her attempt to uncover the regimes of terror of

settlement perpetrated by the symbolic. Whose breath

catches again and again.

Otopos is a reckoning, an elegy, an ode to the Merri

Creek trail that snakes through Melbourne's northern

suburbs and colluvial slopes, teaming with native flora and

fauna, but also imported weeds and predators, including

humans. In its arrangement in three parts, the collection

unfolds displaced fragments and glimpses of histories

through call and response of landscapes and beings. The

poetics active here is a poetics of the liminal: from word

to word, line to line, space to space the narrative persona

writes its shoreless existence, roaming as it does through

lexicons and topographies.