Cirrus@Austlit

'I am a working poet. I spend my days in search and celebration of words, a series of sounds I can weld, if I’m lucky, into insights about being human, and I confess it has never been harder to do so. I have a newborn son, I am a newborn father, and despite a decade of practice at crafting language into literature, this child, so small and insistent and terrifying and beautiful and language-less, has in only a few months shown me how useless, how entirely unnecessary words are for that most important and derided endeavour: love. This is a word, an emotion, a foundational way of living, utterly essential for survival, and yet by invoking it, I’ve erred already – there are few things taken less seriously, or more likely to provoke an eye roll, scoff or sneer, particularly in the realm of writing, which for all that it is deemed effeminate, is nonetheless strangled by a masculine manner and aesthetic. There is an unspoken understanding that one shouldn’t ever be sentimental – meaning literally ‘prompted by feelings’ – and that good prose is ‘muscular’, good writing is ‘brutal’, a ‘gut punch’, a violence. I should know. My own work is often praised with these descriptors, and it’s true, I am geared toward pain, toward sorrow, toward a primal force that makes loss bearable, if that is at all possible, though I would never describe my writing as a violence in the same way that I could never plant a sentence about a flower and hope to see a bud in the soil come spring.' (Introduction)