Or, An Autobiography

by Toby Fitch

An Autobiography explores fluidities of self, body, and imagination. Its central long poem, 'The Or Tree', is a speculative version of the fictitious poem 'The Oak Tree', by Virginia Woolf's Orlando. 'The Oak Tree' takes Orlando over 300 years to write, in which time they live through multiple eras, burn their poetic oeuvre, have various affairs with poets, critics, and a queen, and change gender from man to woman. 'The Or Tree' is an assemblage poem, resurrected chronologically from fragments of the six chapters of a burnt copy of A Biography. It is an homage to androgyny and the non-binary, or rather, an expression of the fluidity we are all capable of. 'Or' is an alter ego and character in the poem (pronouns they/them), as well as a conjunction, and a ghost. 'The Or Tree' is complemented by an 'understorey', a poetic essay that underscores and intertwines with the poem across each chapter in a radical play on the autobiographical and citational.

Genres: Queer

128 pages, Paperback

Published March 3, 2026

About the author

Toby Fitch is poetry editor of Overland and a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Sydney. He is the author of eight books of poetry, including Where Only the Sky had Hung Before (2019), Sydney Spleen (2021) and Object Permanence: Calligrammes (2022). He lives on unceded Gadigal land.

Reviews

[Brendon McLeod · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating and enigmatic investigation of Toby’s quandaries and peregrinations about their gender, as an homage to and a modification of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.