Rights Information

Rights available: UK, US, Can, Trans, Audio, Film/TV

Reviews

‘In this collection, Evelyn Araluen lovingly honours ancestors and country, while she relearns the Aboriginal languages of place and home. At the same time, she ardently critiques settler colonialism, Australiana kitsch, and empty acknowledgements. Throughout, her voice rises and falls like the landscape, her sentences carve the page like rivers, and her words burn a pattern across time like fire. “These are the dreamings we have now,” she tells us. Listen closely, reader. “Listen to the end.”’ Craig Santos Perez, Professor in the English Department at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa

‘You know what to expect of a poet like Evelyn Araluen. Her verse has an unrivalled and merciless clarity of expression and purpose. In Dropbear, she peers through her subjects, right into you – the reader. Evelyn drops her words over gazes and shoulders like a heavy blanket – obscuring or warming, it’s up to you.’ Alison Whittaker

‘Dropbear pushes genre boundaries and, more importantly, brings a rich intertextuality of entanglement – the messiness of the relationship between us and the history of the country that we can’t change and shouldn’t ignore.’ Jeanine Leane

Author Biography

Evelyn Araluen is a poet, researcher and co-editor of Overland Literary Journal. Her widely published criticism, fiction and poetry has been awarded the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, a Wheeler Centre Next Chapter Fellowship, and a Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund grant. Born and raised on Dharug country, she is a descendant of the Bundjalung Nation.