'Throat is the explosive second poetry collection from award-winning Mununjali Yugambeh writer Ellen van Neerven. Exploring love, language and land, van Neerven flexes their distinctive muscles and shines alight on Australia’s unreconciled past and precarious present with humour and heart. Van Neerven is unsparing in the interrogation of colonial impulse, and fiercely loyal to telling the stories that make us who we are.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'Despite the unsettling advancement of weapons technology in the 21st century, storytelling remains a powerful force for promoting conflict resolution and peace. First Nations poetry of peace is a continuation of millennia-old Indigenous practices to maintain or restore balance in our worlds through storytelling.' (Introduction)
'This chapter examines the transnational Australian novel from a different perspective, focusing on First Nations writing. Whereas most visions of the global privilege literary institutions whose power stems from existing political and global inequalities, First Nations writing fosters a transnationalism of resistance, solidarity, and fungibility. It considers Alexis Wrights novels in translation, and writers engaged in collaborative projects.' (Publication abstract)
'It seems hard to believe that Ellen van Neerven’s debut poetry book, Comfort Food, was only published in 2016, given the remarkable evolution we see in Throat, the second collection from the young Mununjali Yugambeh poet. While the titles of both poetry collections similarly draw attention to the mouth, that organ traditionally associated with poets, they do so in ways that highlight the differences between the books. Comfort Food was an offering of short lyrical poems characterised by the kind of openness and generosity associated with acts of sharing meals. Throat, however, is a far edgier book, speaking of vulnerability but also strength, pain and anger.' (Introduction)
'I chose to read this work through the poet’s chosen vessel, the throat. Finishing it left me with my heart right there – beating at the back of my throat; in awe of what I had just read, and in suspenseful anticipation of what is to come.' (Introduction)
'In reading poetry, we look for those rare moments where a creative sequence of words thoroughly subjects our thinking, our feeling and our knowledge to a momentary realisation of reinterpreted or interrupted truth. There are many of those moments one finds while reading Ellen Van Neerven’s poetry collection Throat (2020).' (Introduction)
'In 2017, just over a year after the publication of Ellen van Neerven’s debut collection of poetry, Comfort Food, the poet Omar Sakr called van Neerven ‘[T]he brightest star in my generation of authors’. Gomeroi poet and multitasker Alison Whittaker marvelled, ‘I have no idea what contemporary Australian literature would look like without Ellen.’'
At Home with Ellen Van Neerven
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2020
19698807
2020
single work
interview
podcast
'Ellen van Neerven is an award-winning poet and writer of Mununjali Yugambeh and Dutch heritage. They write fiction, poetry, plays and non-fiction.
'Ellen’s first book, Heat and Light, was the recipient of the David Unaipon Award, the Dobbie Literary Award and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Indigenous Writers Prize. Ellen’s second book, a collection of poetry, Comfort Food, was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize and highly commended for the 2016 Wesley Michel Wright Prize. Throat is Ellen’s third word and her second poetry collection.' (Production introduction)
