Koel

(Paperback)

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Description

Crawford tills the ecological value of mnemonic and affective archives where an early subjective attachment to the natural overcomes exploitative human-nature relationships. Koel creates a third mindscape that explores cohabitant intimacies across species within the warm and dewy contexts of childhood memory, adolescent desire, and the adult effort to survive without harming other creatures.

'I wrote most of this book on campus in Singapore, surrounded by a ring of jungle that couldn't encroach as fast as it was being thinned out. The circles and mosses of that location tilt and transect others Auckland, Bicol, an empty Bangkok penthouse, and somewhere else, entirely see-through. It seemed important to be as close to sleep as possible, so I closed windows and wore headphones. Not to shut things out or make them stranger, but to soften and modulate the tensions of exchange.

In Bangkok, excavators swim up and down the canals. They float on barges and scoop themselves through the water. The water pools and resists, carrying places to places on its way.

In the 'epoch of simultaneity' not all spaces are equally accessible to thought or description. Rituals of immersion, of the maze and the gate, may not open anything but the body's ability to accumulate and to disperse, to be near and far, here and there. Memory, presence and imagination fold and run together. I was looking for gaps to step through, for ways both forward and back.' Jen Crawford

Author Bio

Jen Crawford is Assistant Professor at University of Canberra, and the author of five poetry books, including Admissions, Bad Appendix and Pop Riveter. She is a member of the advisory board for Poetry New Zealand, and is a contributing editor to Axon and the Journal of Poetics Research. She has taught in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, where she was the founding coordinator of Nanyang Technological University's Creative Writing Programme. She received her PhD from the University of Wollongong in 2005 for a dissertation focused on magical child characters as they appear in millennial New Zealand fiction.