'As with "Australia Zoo," "Brisbane River" invites us not only to praise our now tamable, now untamable, above all coeval, ecosystems but also to consider how we have-at best poorly repaid, at worst bankrupted-our squarings (to adapt the title of Seamus Heaney's finest sonnet sequences). (10) The dialectics of "Australia Zoo," "Brisbane River," and "The Flood"-and Riordan's poetry as a whole-invites an ecopoetically foundational question: did nature hit us, or did we hit nature?' (Publication abstract)