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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'This book has multiple fire exits. This book has too many keys. You can climb through a window into this book. Some of these poems are not on the lease, and you are willing to take it all the way to the Residential Tenancies Authority.
In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard says ‘a house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability’. These poems ask what proofs of stability we build when our homes and selves are in perpetual flux.
After the Demolition is about rebuilding as much as it is about taking apart. It is about moving, and about moving on – what we leave behind, and what we attach more firmly to ourselves. When a place is gone – because we’ve given the keys back, or because the locks are lopped off – our attachment can drive us towards saudade, nostalgia, replication. We mythologise the flaws of our past haunts and past lives, and this determines the ways we start over when everything is air rights.'
Source: Author's blurb.
Notes
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Includes introduction by Keri Glastonbury.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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General Tenancy Agreement
2022
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Axon : Creative Explorations , December vol. 12 no. 2 2022;'Notions of home and unhomeliness have long been discussed by scholars in relation to Australian poetry, but little scholarly work has explored how contemporary Australian poets interrogate the relationship between renting and constructions of home. As the great Australian dream of homeownership becomes increasingly inaccessible and the availability of public housing declines, a larger proportion of the population privately rent their houses in a lightly regulated and highly competitive rental market (Morris et al 2021: 72). Poetry has long been used to record and preserve the affective dimensions of home, and in this paper I examine a series of poems concerned with finding rental properties, moving in and out of them, and with attempts to create a sense of home in houses that always already belong to others. I discuss the work of three poets whose recent collections grapple with notions of home, stability and security in relation to rented houses: Zenobia Frost’s After the Demolition (2019), Omar Sakr’s These Wild Houses (2017), and Fiona Wright’s Domestic Interior (2017). I argue that in these collections, houses are sites characterised by anxiety, instability, and erasure, rather than stable and secure archives of personal identity and domestic ritual.' (Publication abstract)
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Moving Houses : A Conversation with Zenobia Frost
Kate Durbin
(interviewer),
2021
single work
interview
— Appears in: Los Angeles Review of Books , February 2021; QUEENSLANDER ZENOBIA FROST’s poetics across books, and Twine projects, shows a keen interest in class and its relationship to place. Her poems enter into the structures Australians occupy in their daily lives, houses, office buildings, and even graves, speaking to the ghosts that occupy them. Her first book, Salt and Bone, published in 2014 with Walleah Press in Tasmania, examined cemetery history and the impacts of class on graveyard security. Frost has received a number of fellowships and premier Australian literary awards, and is a programming director at the Queensland Poetry Festival. Her latest book, After the Demolition, presents the reader with a sumptuous poetics of architecture and loss. The poems are tender queer domestic portraits as much as they are encapsulations of the state of flux that is being a lifelong renter. We corresponded about the housing crises in both the United States and Australia, the relationship between architecture and the body, poems as houses, writing through grief, and contemporary Australian poetics over several days in January 2021.' (Introduction)
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Anders Villani Reviews After the Demolition by Zenobia Frost
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Plumwood Mountain [Online] , November 2020;
— Review of After the Demolition 2019 selected work poetry -
The Houses That Hold Us : Zenobia Frost's After the Demolition
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Verity La , April 2020;
— Review of After the Demolition 2019 selected work poetry -
Launch : Zenobia Frost's After the Demolition
2019
single work
essay
— Appears in: Communion Literary Magazine , December no. 12 2019;
-
September in Poetry
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: Overland [Online] , September 2019;
— Review of Autobiochemistry 2019 selected work poetry ; After the Demolition 2019 selected work poetry ; Fish Song 2019 selected work poetry ; AXIS : Book 2 2019 selected work poetry -
The Houses That Hold Us : Zenobia Frost's After the Demolition
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Verity La , April 2020;
— Review of After the Demolition 2019 selected work poetry -
Anders Villani Reviews After the Demolition by Zenobia Frost
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Plumwood Mountain [Online] , November 2020;
— Review of After the Demolition 2019 selected work poetry -
Launch : Zenobia Frost's After the Demolition
2019
single work
essay
— Appears in: Communion Literary Magazine , December no. 12 2019; -
Moving Houses : A Conversation with Zenobia Frost
Kate Durbin
(interviewer),
2021
single work
interview
— Appears in: Los Angeles Review of Books , February 2021; QUEENSLANDER ZENOBIA FROST’s poetics across books, and Twine projects, shows a keen interest in class and its relationship to place. Her poems enter into the structures Australians occupy in their daily lives, houses, office buildings, and even graves, speaking to the ghosts that occupy them. Her first book, Salt and Bone, published in 2014 with Walleah Press in Tasmania, examined cemetery history and the impacts of class on graveyard security. Frost has received a number of fellowships and premier Australian literary awards, and is a programming director at the Queensland Poetry Festival. Her latest book, After the Demolition, presents the reader with a sumptuous poetics of architecture and loss. The poems are tender queer domestic portraits as much as they are encapsulations of the state of flux that is being a lifelong renter. We corresponded about the housing crises in both the United States and Australia, the relationship between architecture and the body, poems as houses, writing through grief, and contemporary Australian poetics over several days in January 2021.' (Introduction)
-
General Tenancy Agreement
2022
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Axon : Creative Explorations , December vol. 12 no. 2 2022;'Notions of home and unhomeliness have long been discussed by scholars in relation to Australian poetry, but little scholarly work has explored how contemporary Australian poets interrogate the relationship between renting and constructions of home. As the great Australian dream of homeownership becomes increasingly inaccessible and the availability of public housing declines, a larger proportion of the population privately rent their houses in a lightly regulated and highly competitive rental market (Morris et al 2021: 72). Poetry has long been used to record and preserve the affective dimensions of home, and in this paper I examine a series of poems concerned with finding rental properties, moving in and out of them, and with attempts to create a sense of home in houses that always already belong to others. I discuss the work of three poets whose recent collections grapple with notions of home, stability and security in relation to rented houses: Zenobia Frost’s After the Demolition (2019), Omar Sakr’s These Wild Houses (2017), and Fiona Wright’s Domestic Interior (2017). I argue that in these collections, houses are sites characterised by anxiety, instability, and erasure, rather than stable and secure archives of personal identity and domestic ritual.' (Publication abstract)