Controlled Burn

(Paperback)

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Controlled Burn is an antipastoral collection with a difference. Poems closely and compassionately situate woman at the centre of interconnected legacies of colonial, economic, domestic and military violence. Images of fire, heat and ecological degradation thread free-verse, localist poems such as 'The Woman Who Ran the Farm', 'Aqua Nullius' and 'Petroleum', chronicling devastating impacts. Elsewhere, poems such as 'Painted weather' and the ekphrastic villanelle 'The Hay Wain's Cry', foreground disconnects between high culture and climate change activism. Institutional art brings solace, but may be a lame raft, clung to at our peril. The collection is rounded off by poems offering blistering satires of a techno-feudalist world; metapoetic poems such as 'Password' and 'The Sentence' portray the slow violence of online fora and erosions of the rule of law which differently undermine what it means to be human on a shared planet.

In this visionary collection, A. Frances Johnson's cautionary threnodies muse on environmental depletion, colonial dispossession and personal loss. These poems deftly criticise enduring theme-park notions of the natural in spheres poetic, and beyond.

Author Bio

A. Frances Johnson is an award-winning writer and artist and recovering academic. Her most recent poetry collection is Save As (Puncher and Wattmann 2021). She has published four collections of poetry, a novel Eugene's Falls (Arcadia 2007) and a monograph, Australian Fiction as Archival Salvage (Brill 2015). In 2020, she won the International ABR Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Other awards include the Griffith UniversityJosephine Ulrick Prize (2016) and the Michel Wesley Wright Prize (2012). In 2018 her collection Rendition for Harp and Kalashnikov was shortlisted for the Melbourne Prize for Literature Best New Writing Award.