Flat Exit

This is a book of skin and breath, of textures and interstices. The poems are love letters, implied dialogues, addressed to a you, a shifting second person whose actions, appearance or absence shape a transitive — or, rather, intersubjective — poetic voice which is both queer and queering. Love both makes us and unmakes us, a truism that underpins centuries-long lyrical practice, to which Flat Exit adds its own flourish.

'Flat Exit is about greetings and departures, learning to let go and circle back to pick up what remains. These poems jump between north-eastern Victoria and Melbourne, romantic and platonic relationships, moments of personal triumph and those of shellshocked grief.

Collected here in this sequence, they explore the dislocation that occurs when moving from regional Australian to its urban mass, and when falling in and out of love for the first time. The poems revolve from homesickness, to self-care, to finding a soul to complement my own at an unexpected time and in an unexpected place – and life before and after the death of a close friend.

Many of these poems are autobiographical; some are fiction. My intention is not to be confessional but – as Gwen Harwood says — to establish 'a way of seeing'. Mine, as it's been so far.' — Broede Carmody