Dropbear
by Evelyn Araluen
Description
I told you this was a thirst so great it could carve rivers.
This fierce debut from award-winning writer Evelyn Araluen confronts the tropes and iconography of an unreconciled nation with biting satire and lyrical fury. Dropbear interrogates the complexities of colonial and personal history with an alternately playful, tender and mournful intertextual voice, deftly navigating the responsibilities that gather from sovereign country, the spectres of memory and the debris of settler-coloniality. This innovative mix of poetry and essay offers an eloquent witness to the entangled present, an uncompromising provocation of history, and an embattled but redemptive hope for a decolonial future.
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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.
University of Queensland Press (UQP)
Established in 1948, UQP is a dynamic publishing house known for its innovative philosophy and commitment to producing books of high quality and cultural significance. UQP publishes books for general readers in the areas of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, Indigenous writing and youth literature as well as scholarly works. Our books and authors have received national and international recognition through literary prizes. These include the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the ABIAs, the CBCAs, the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis and the White Raven awards.
View all titlesBibliographic Information
- Publisher UQP
- Publication Date March 2021
- Orginal LanguageEnglish
- ISBN/Identifier 9780702263187
- Publication Country or regionAustralia
- FormatPaperback
- ReadershipGeneral
- Publish StatusUnpublished