Across three long poems, Astrid Lorange investigates relation itself as a political problem.

The poems move freely between theory, archival and bureaucratic language, personal experience and the vocabulary of ordinary attachment. In the opening sequence, Cold War CIA correspondence becomes material for thinking about friendship, suspicion and the instability of categories such as ally and enemy. Elsewhere, Lorange turns to childbirth and reproductive labour, refusing the sentimental separation of birth from other forms of work and placing bodily reproduction alongside capitalism, colonialism, care and collective life. The result is poetry with the density of criticism but without surrendering the oddness, intimacy or humour of lived experience.

It’s a particularly sharp example of contemporary Australian poetry using the poem not simply to describe politics, but to think through it.

Cordite Publishing Inc., Carlton South, Victoria, 2020. First edition, first printing. Paperback. Book 03 in Cordite Books Series 4. Very light shelf wear to wrappers; internally clean and unmarked, binding firm. Near fine condition.