Cirrus@Austlit

'I first heard of Elena Gomez when a friend of mine who was living in London DM’d me a link via Instagram with the message ‘another commie poet in Melbourne!!’. I had just started writing poems, so this was kind of like when a parent notices you are in an awkward phase of identity, and naively suggests you hang out with the cool girl at school who is two years above you. I love hearted their message and ordered Elena’s recently published debut book, Body of Work. When I met Elena a year or so later, we were both in a Marxist reading group, which I soon realised was made up of mostly poets. Elena and I were sitting across from each other on low sagging couches while two people between us engaged in one of those conversations poets are often guilty of: the topic is something tangible and relatable, like work and gender, and yet it turns into something that is abstracted to the point that no one knows what’s going on, or if they ever did. At some point in the reading session, Elena intervened and summed up the conversation with a famous line from the Wages Against Housework movement: ‘They say it’s love, we say it’s unwaged work’. I thought, I love this bitch.'  (Introduction)