A small, local argument about how mourning exposes how little of a person was ever theirs alone.

Written in the aftermath of the sudden death of Hart’s mother, these poems and fragmentary prose move through traces a person leaves, and what it means to recover beyond them. Hart’s Marxist-feminist thinking sits within it all. Motherhood and intimacy appear as forms of labour; bodies are porous and collectively made; weeds become figures for lives growing outside intended structures. Julia Trybala’s drawings and artwork extend this logic visually, so that Petal operates somewhere between poetry collection, grief document and artist’s book.

Incendium Radical Library & Press, Melbourne, 2021. First edition. Paperback, with artwork by Julia Trybala. Light edge and corner wear; internally clean and sound.