Novelties
*Winner of the Kenneth Slessor Prize, NSW Premier's Literary Awards, 2014*
‘Fiona Hile’s new book, Novelties, announces her poetry to the world as a pathematical tornado from the steppes.'
In her first full-length collection, prize-winning poet Fiona Hile applies the ambitions and strategies of fiction to produce genuinely novel poems that signal 'a state of poetic emergency'.
Novelties resonates with the themes of nature, love, and literature while showcasing Hile's command of style and form — the traditional Australian ballad is thwarted through playful, hyperbolic language to provide a counterfeit narrative of Australian poetry; the history of love is seized and re-written, with desire placed on consignment to a leased-out libido; and elements of the traditional Australian aesthetic are conscripted to appear in an impossible evocation in which 'all novels are short stories, all stories are really poems', and an easel is a guillotine for writing poems about nature.
Fiona Hile's poetry has been published in the Age, Overland, the Sun-Herald, and Cordite. Her chapbook of poems, The Family Idiot, was published in 2012. Her stories, features, reviews and interviews have been published in the Age, Southerly, Art & Australia, and the Monthly. In 2012, she won the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize and was recently awarded second place in the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize. She lives in Melbourne.
