Cirrus@Austlit

'Scott-Patrick Mitchell’s Clean (Upswell 2022) and Alan Fyfe’s T (Transit Lounge 2022) are books with a deep relation. A poetry collection and a novel respectively, Clean and T were released within less than a year of each other and attracted multiple award listings; and both deal with methamphetamine use in Western Australia, a state which consumes the drug at almost twice the national average. The authors share a longstanding friendship. Here, they discuss the highs and lows of writing about meth use from a basis of lived experience. This conversation was conducted over email in January.'  (Introduction)

'In this volume, Scott-Patrick Mitchell propels us into the seething mess of the methamphetamine crisis in Australia today. These poems roil and scratch, exploring the precarious life of addiction and its sleep deprivation. From an unsteady and unsavoury life, we are released into the joy of a recovery made through sheer hard work.

'Even in the disintegration, the poet points us towards love and carries tenderness every day in memory. Scott-Patrick Mitchell’s decades of spoken-word practice has enabled a fine tuning on the page when, for so many readers, we enter into an alien zone of unknowing.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.