Product Description
- 2024 SHORTLIST – NSW PREMIER’S LITERARY AWARDS (POETRY)
- 2023 SHORTLIST – FIVE ISLANDS POETRY PRIZE FOR A FIRST BOOK OF POETRY
Moon Wrasse is a voyage through transformation and disenfranchised grief: parenthood ambivalence, queer infertility, gender transition from the perspective of a life partner; a navigation of identity in a time of climate crisis. It is also a love song to reading in the dialogic tradition of the lyric mode. Alert to questions of intersubjectivity and ‘what shapes us’ these poems arise from encounters with Australian and international poets, contemporary philosophy and science, popular music and ecological non-fiction. These are poems that speak back, speak to, read with and whisper alongside; that seek to sing the emergent self into being. They are deeply engaged with the notion that we are shaped by the voices around us as well as those we carry within.
Moon Wrasse is bounteous, sinuous and queer, haunting in its embrace of grief, shifting identities, and transformation. The poems create a supple chemistry between the visceral and the uncanny through various transformational exchanges across animal, vegetable and mineral ecospheres. Here is an invigorating fertility of voice, especially notable in the book’s agile sonics, its hum of presence, and its ardent dialogue with other poets and writers. This is a striking and richly lyrical debut, vibrant in its singing, intensely mobile, and compelling in its recuperative gestures. – Jill Jones
Willo Drummond’s poetry is exhilarating for its balance of the visceral, the intuitive and the intellectual. Intimate and tender experience is framed and reframed with deep reading both of other poets’ work and the more-than-human world, in innovative ways. – Felicity Plunkett
Willo Drummond’s Moon Wrasse is a trillion fragments held lightly, a love letter, a glimmer flick at the corner of an eye. Here is a poet who writes with exceptional clarity, warmth, and conviction; who gifts us queer and trans bodies, lives, and ecologies. Desire, pain, love and hope play in and through this collection to make a work that simultaneously shimmers and cuts. On these pages you will find salt stung wind, bodies touching, turning, and all ways transforming; ghost orchids, grasses, the quiet shadow work of roots and moths… On these pages you will find ‘a message in the moss’. This is a collection to come back to many times, with and through the body, with love. – Quinn Eades
REVIEWS
“Drummond, goes to lengths to emphasise literary quality in the poetry… following Drummond’s thesis: that poetic dialogue is transformative and that transformation can be transgressive, difficult, and inevitable… is a brilliant book of poetry that reflects the vivid diversity and invention which is becoming characteristic of Australian poetry. Any reader of poetry will find satisfaction in these pages.” SAM RYAN, Australian Book Review (paywalled)
“A complex, intriguing and quite exciting first book …a world of liminality and transformation, …which poses questions about the nature and possibilities of lyric poetry.” MARTIN DUWELL, Australian Poetry Review
“Willo Drummond’s ability to hone in on the most precise, often unusual, word to create an instant impact comes across in every poem in this exquisite debut collection, Moon Wrasse…The title poem sits at the heart of the book, exploring the transformation of a trans-partner, but also redefining the relationship, the nature of the partnership, and the whole notion of identity…Moon Wrasse is a book of powerful intelligence and careful restraint that unites grief and joy in ways that are both precise and expansive.” MAGDALENA BALL, Compulsive Reader
“Moon Wrasse offers a poetic space in which human identity entangles inextricably with the species, assemblages and ecosystems of the natural world. The entire collection of Moon Wrasse reveals this idea of a porous self, evolving and re-evolving in conversation with other poetic voices, the environment, and the complicated interconnections that make us deeply human.” SOPHIE FINLAY, TEXT
“Like the fish of its title, this is a shimmery collection of poetry that explores transformation, identity and the permeable self… Loss, grief and the ecologies of the natural environment also offer Drummond inspiration for her luminous and multi-layered words.” THUY ON, Artshub
“Willo Drummond’s poetry collection extends the poetics of Rilke and Levertov, emphasizing immersive conversations with the world—the unravelling power of careful observation and recordings” MISBAH WOLF, MASCARA
“There are mesmerising lines of image and idea in this stunning debut, seductive measures that take you on intricate and thrilling trains of thought and feeling to ineffable, profound perceptions and insights into the liminal spaces between nature and human, body and spirit, between being and becoming.” JUDGES’ COMMENT, 2024 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards
“If revolution—for Walter Benjamin—was a way of pulling the emergency brake on history, of creating a break in which the potential for a radical reworking of the world becomes actionable—Drummond achieve[s] something similar on the atomic level of language.” JOCELYN SUZANNE, Plumwood Mountain Journal
