Issue Details: First known date: 2018... 2018 Review Short : Shastra Deo’s The Agonist
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'Shastra Deo’s first volume of poetry, The Agonist contains many poems about corporeal life, and about the separation of bodies, problematising the connections between body and thought. The poems often turn the inside out, as it were, opening up a poetic anatomy of internal organs and interior life. They dwell periodically on in-between states – to some extent symbolised by skin, space and emptiness – and they persistently return to tropes of rupture and penetration. As they explore such territory, they tend to alienate usual notions of humanity, asking the reader to consider whether their mind/body assumptions hold true – and intimacy itself is sometimes viewed askance through such perspectives, as in the lines: ‘You may be forgiven/ for thinking that love/ is a butcher’s ritual’. For Deo, it is not so much that the human body has a life all of its own, but that the flesh ‘speaks’, as it were, of human experience and human circumstance in lateral ways.'  (Introduction)

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    y separately published work icon Cordite Poetry Review No Theme VII no. 86 1 May 2018 13979368 2018 periodical issue

    'Four years ago, writing an essay on David Malouf, I learned that Hawthorn Library held a copy of his first poetry collection, Bicycle and Other Poems (1970). I borrowed it, and, sadly, I returned it, too. Today, I rang the library to find the book. The friendly librarian on duty told me that it had been ‘deleted’ from the catalogue. She could find no record of whether they had given it away or thrown it in the recycling bin.' (Lisa Gorton, Introduction to No Theme VII)

    2018
Last amended 22 May 2018 12:54:52
http://cordite.org.au/reviews/hetherington-deo/ Review Short : Shastra Deo’s The Agonistsmall AustLit logo Cordite Poetry Review
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