Dominic Symes writes the contemporary city as a kind of overfilled browser tab.

Except the tabs aren't all fun. There's rent, work, weather, Instagram, protest slogans, family trivia, coffee shops, dating, memory and administrative indignities that being alive seems to tally up. Songs of Love and Hate Speech is funny without being glib, intimate without turning confessional, and unusually alert to the ways everyday language has been colonised by platforms.

The poems move through Melbourne with a restless, associative logic. In “korean grocer,” a wet bench, a bad coffee, a tattoo glimpsed online and something once said by the speaker’s father coexist inside the same drifting field of attention. “security questions (true vulnerability)” is even better: the banal machinery of online identity verification becomes an accidental autobiography, where maiden names, first pets, school, cars and birthdays reveal considerably more of a life than the supposedly meaningful questions ever could.

There’s something appealingly grubby and immediate about it: poetry made from whatever happens to be lying around.

Edition & condition: Rabbit Poetry Journal, 2026. First edition. Paperback. Very light shelf wear; clean and near fine.