Alogopoiesis
Alogopoiesis - Amelia Walker's fifth poetry collection - takes its title from a compound the poet has coined herself: alogia, a condition of reduced or absent speech, joined to poiesis, the Ancient Greek word for making. The book is therefore a making from silence: a poetics of the unstated, a construction of meaning from what is withheld, omitted, or forbidden.
Structured in twelve sections with an intermission, the collection is not a linear anthology but a single macro-poem whose parts are recursive and interwoven. Readers follow a cast of recurring figures - MaggieMem, whose head keeps coming unglued; a child and the tortoise she cannot name; a Hungry Woman navigating the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the Department of New Beginnings; and an island that speaks and suffers - through iterations and variations that accumulate meaning like sediment. Each poem in a sequence appears in multiple versions, progressively stripped or rebuilt, so that what is left unsaid in one version haunts the next.
Thematically, Walker moves across domestic violence, queer desire, infertility, childhood trauma, mental illness, gender violence, refugee experience, ageing, and the settler-colonial suburban landscape of 1980s and 1990s Australia. The personal is always political here: a girl learning the word lesbian in the school playground; a woman washing dishes at 3am to survive a relationship; a survivor in a supermarket, silenced by the question why don't they just leave?. Formally, the book mobilises blank space and silence through erasure, fragmentation, auto-cento (poems composed from lines harvested from across the collection itself), prose poems of escalating narrative force, and stark lyric compression.
Amelia Walker lectures in creative writing at the University of South Australia and has published poetry, education resources, and research internationally. This book was written on Kaurna Yerta, the lands of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide plains, and pays respect to Kaurna Elders past and present. Published by Life Before Man / Gazebo Books, 2023.
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