Alan Wearne’s Prepare the Cabin for Landing is a book of poems about movement, speech, work, sex and class, centered around Australian life.

Wearne has always been interested in the social world as overheard language: the half-boast, the workplace anecdote, the family argument, the pub voice, the badly concealed vanity. These poems keep that ear trained on people in transit—literal and otherwise—moving through airports, relationships, jobs and versions of themselves.

The title poem’s aviation setting is typical of Wearne’s method. Bureaucratic language, casual obscenity, masculine bravado and everyday absurdity all sit in the same cabin. His poems are often narrative, character-driven and dramatically voiced, closer at times to miniature scenes than to conventional lyric confession. The comedy can be broad, but underneath it is a sharp interest in social performance: how people make themselves legible through idiom, occupation, class markers and the stories they tell about what happened.

Published by Giramondo, this is a good entry point into one of the stranger currents of contemporary Australian poetry: vernacular, theatrical, irreverent and intensely alert to how people actually talk.

Giramondo Publishing, 2012. First edition paperback. Light shelf wear and minor rubbing to covers; clean and sound internally.