pam brown’s text thing is a slim, sharp little poetry collection, all of which have that loose, talky, jagged energy she is famed for.
Within, there's fragments, asides, jokes, observations, small hostilities, sudden tenderness, and lines that feel like they’ve been lifted from the street, the notebook, the overheard conversation, the half-finished email, the day that got away from you.
This is very much contemporary Australian poetry in its lived-in, anti-grand mode: casual on the surface, but formally alert; funny without trying to become “light”; suspicious of polish; interested in the texture of actual thinking as it happens. There’s a nice self-aware crankiness to it too — poetry about poetry, readers, blurbs, scenes, boredom, desire, bad design, shopping complexes, traffic, phones, and the minor humiliations of literary life. A good one for readers of Australian poetry, small press poetics, experimental/plainspoken lyric, Ania Walwicz, joanne burns, Gig Ryan, and people who like poems that know the page is also a social situation.
Published by Little Esther Books in 2002, for Feral & Boffin / Feral + Distingué. Paperback. ISBN 0958626138. Cover image by Kurt Brereton, with design/layout credited to Shocking Looking Books and Kim Sutton. Good second-hand condition, with light shelfwear and handling.
