Pam Brown’s 50-50 is a poetry collection built from overheard speech, travel, suburbia, bars, streets, music, memories and politics.

Brown’s poems resist the grand lyrical gesture in favour of fragments, shifts in register and strangely precise observations, letting thought wander across the page rather than forcing it into a neat argument. Published in 1997, it belongs to a long-running Australian experimental tradition concerned with what language sounds like once poetry stops pretending everyday speech is beneath it. 

The collection moves through Sydney fast and loose, its typography and spacing doing almost as much work as punctuation. Poems such as “In Ultimo” turn the city into a field of minor encounters, objects and digressions, while elsewhere cultural references—from Nina Simone to modernism—arrive almost casually and then disappear again. Brown’s method is collage-like, particularly good on nostalgia, place and the mental sediment left by cities. 50-50 was Brown’s twelfth poetry collection and is now a relatively uncommon example of late-1990s Australian independent poetry publishing.

Little Esther Books / South Australian Publishing Ventures & Futures Inc., Adelaide, 1997. First edition. Paperback. Light shelf wear and handling to covers; minor marks and edge wear. Internally clean and unmarked; binding firm. Very good condition.