'Not Telling is a lyrical analysis of the possibilities and limitations of language. In three distinct sections it entwines notions of speech and silence with intolerable psychic matter such as intergenerational grief, loss and the lasting effects of cultural voicelessness. The personal intersects with the political in depictions of black mothers bearing the weight of colonisation, human relationships halting and failing and the complexities of dream interpretation. The poems disrupt time and linearity, weaving metaphor into Freudian, Irigarayan and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Not Telling illustrates the ongoing legacy of colonial dispossession and the strength of its survivors through representations of the wretched damage caused by the invasion of (Australia), as well as musings on sacred land and celebration of continued culture. It testiïfies to the systemic oppression of Aboriginal people, connecting present-day black trauma with its origins. Jolted by the life realities of who we were, and are, alongside exacting accounts of genocide, the reader is immersed in a rich and harrowing world. Not Telling sits at the nexus of the individual psyche and the human collective as a unique expression of the (Australian) experience.' (Publication summary)
