Knocks

by Emily Stewart

Winner of the inaugural Noel Rowe Poetry Award. Knocks is the debut collection from one of the most exacting writers of Australian poetry's new wave. Stewart's poetry consistently surprises in its formal range, encompassing sonnets, erasures and found poetry, and striking at the level of the image -"the computer ecstasy of first-person." The collection conveys the sense of an extended, "stretched" present, politically shadowed, where "it is commendable / to sign up each day, but better / to maintain a patina of disobedient / actions, shoplifting or whatever." Individual poems consider place, persona, fandom, viruses, data and desire in evoking "a residual gala of feeling." Yet out of variety emerges a very particular architecture: these are the works of a poet obsessed with the structure of the everyday; its litter and networks, idiom and drama: "today a princess bites off her plait / today paper shredders are put to good use." Tender, argumentative, affecting - this is poetry that moves. "There is more than one kind of poem here, thank the Lord. Poems even differ between modes, get meta on our saggy adulthoods. The generation you didn't know you were disappointed in not arriving has arrived. In Stewart poetics has a new seat in parliament for wetlands and other erasures. If you have a thing for internet stockings, read this. Not to mention mixed diction Australia, fuck! we don't just get to live here, we get to write about that shit." - Michael Farrell "Emily Stewart delivers punchy constructions of contemporary life in the Anthropocene and beyond. She wields her language sharply, imagery exploding with unexpected confluences that sweep routine assumptions aside." - Jane Gibian

Genres: Poetry

78 pages, Paperback

Published May 16, 2016

Reviews

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first I found myself struggling to like this collection. There are a lot of poems about modern life and modern concerns - the Internet, Facebook, Twitter etc. Not that this is a bad thing - in some ways it would be weird not to ever write about those things as they are so much part of modern life - but for me there was a little too much of it. There are also quite a few cut-ups, erasures and found poems - some more successful than others. The collection was redeemed (at least for me) by the long sequence "Today" (which, the notes at the back tell me, borrows heavily from David Attenborough documentaries). I really enjoyed this sequence and found my self wanting to straight away read it again. I will be interested to see what Emily Stewart does next.

[Rory Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

sardonic, playful, sincere. everything i want out of contemporary poetry! i loved moving thru the different forms toyed with in this book.