The “throat” of the title is both physical and metaphor: voice, vulnerability, intake, obstruction.

Published in 2020, Throat is Ellen van Neerven’s third poetry collection and a sharp departure from lyric containment. The poems are short, pressurised, and politically alert, moving between urban life, institutional language, queerness, racialisation, and refusal. 

Van Neerven’s work here is alert to power and its vocabularies—corporate, bureaucratic, activist—testing how language is swallowed, repurposed, or choked off. Throat has become a reference point in recent Australian poetry for its precision and its resistance to sentimentality.

Edition note: University of Queensland Press edition. Paperback.