'You don’t remember this place. This land could be
arid or hungry or wet or rot. That does not matter. Your memory
can’t tell you what no longer exists.
'Beginning in the nuclear waste deposits of our future, The Exclusion Zone bears witness in a language degrading faster than the radioactive byproducts of our history and our present. At once prophecy and annihilation, these poems speak with ghosts, questioning how our words – and what they seek to preserve – can contend with the inevitability of their own decay. Nuclear materials drift throughout this collection, metastasising and resisting their own disposal. The Exclusion Zone is a poetry of warning, of séance, of incantation – a poetry of what survives, where the apocalypse-to-be manifests in human tenderness and vulnerability.' (Publication summary)
Epigraph:
The urge to self-annihilate occasionally overwhelms the best of us.
Exhibit A: the atom bomb. Exhibit B: love.
—Laird Barron, 'Gamma'
All a poet can do today is warn.
—Wilfred Owen, 'Preface'
Preppers and Survivalism in the AustLit Database
This work has been affiliated with the Preppers and Survivalism project due to its relationship to either prepping or prepper-inflected survivalism more generally, and contains one or more of the following:
1. A strong belief in some imminent threat
2. Taking active steps to prepare for that perceived threat
3. A character or characters (or text) who self-identify as a ‘prepper’, or some synonymous/modified term: ‘financial preppers’, ‘weekend preppers’, ‘fitness preppers’, etc.
'Deo twists the boundaries of form and content in her second collection of poetry.'
'Shastra Deo’s writing effortlessly transcends cultural rifts, striving from modernist allusion through indulgent fan fiction and out into something entirely unique. I met Shastra first via Instagram, then conducted our interview in a Google Doc over several months, spaced out to allow for other freelance work, literature festivals or burnout. Despite being the outcome of her PhD, her second book, The Exclusion Zone, brims with an unexpected bloodlust and spectral force. To my personal delight, her poems demand we expand our conception of what is deemed literature, reminding us how poetry draws so much of its potency from its rich network of connections.' (Introduction)
'There is a story told in Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer I’ve never been able to forget. It’s about a cameraman who longed for a medal. This cameraman had read a lot of Hemingway, and he knew from his reading that war makes you real, so he went into the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation to do some filming. This was soon after the explosion, when the place was being ‘cleaned’ and the people were being evacuated. He saw villagers washing the roofs of the buildings and Soviet workers burying the very soil of the place deep in the soil. He saw cattle being shot and the bulldozers that had dug a giant trench to bury the cattle. Everything went deep into the ground.' (Introduction)
'These days the line between dystopian and realist narratives feels increasingly blurred. The virtual world too now seems inseparable from the physical. The Exclusion Zone amply demonstrates that poetry is able to speak to these convergences.' (Introduction)
'There is a story told in Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer I’ve never been able to forget. It’s about a cameraman who longed for a medal. This cameraman had read a lot of Hemingway, and he knew from his reading that war makes you real, so he went into the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation to do some filming. This was soon after the explosion, when the place was being ‘cleaned’ and the people were being evacuated. He saw villagers washing the roofs of the buildings and Soviet workers burying the very soil of the place deep in the soil. He saw cattle being shot and the bulldozers that had dug a giant trench to bury the cattle. Everything went deep into the ground.' (Introduction)
'Shastra Deo’s writing effortlessly transcends cultural rifts, striving from modernist allusion through indulgent fan fiction and out into something entirely unique. I met Shastra first via Instagram, then conducted our interview in a Google Doc over several months, spaced out to allow for other freelance work, literature festivals or burnout. Despite being the outcome of her PhD, her second book, The Exclusion Zone, brims with an unexpected bloodlust and spectral force. To my personal delight, her poems demand we expand our conception of what is deemed literature, reminding us how poetry draws so much of its potency from its rich network of connections.' (Introduction)
