Cirrus@Austlit

'Exploring relations to place, ways we receive language as we move in the world, and anxieties of communication, hotel universo particularizes the rendered, the middling and ostensibly universal. Written in Newcastle's suburbs and published here its poems reflect and reside in a politics of location. Despite its interest in the transitory, hotel universo, and poetry more widely, is a place we have come to, 'and never left'.' (Publication summary)

'Of the 62 sonnets that make up John Mateer’s João, 58 are given to ‘Twelve Years of Travel’ and only four to the second and final section, ‘Memories of Cape Town’. This weighting emphasises travel not so much as the mode of exception but as regular or even habituated experience, while suggesting only a marginal place for the ‘home’ of Mateer’s South African origins.' (Introduction)