The Exclusion Zone

(Paperback)

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An imaginative, high concept and distinctive new collection from the winner of the Shapcott Prize and the ALS Gold Medal. You don't remember this place. This land could be arid or hungry or wet or rot. That does not matter. Your memory can't tell you what no longer exists. Beginning in the nuclear waste deposits of our future, The Exclusion Zone bears witness in a language degrading faster than the radioactive byproducts of our history and our present. At once prophecy and annihilation, these poems speak with ghosts, questioning how our words - and what they seek to preserve - can contend with the inevitability of their own decay. Nuclear materials drift throughout this collection, metastasising and resisting their own disposal. The Exclusion Zone is a poetry of warning, of seance, of incantation - a poetry of what survives, where the apocalypse-to-be manifests in human tenderness and vulnerability.

Author Bio

Shastra Deo was born in Fiji, raised in Melbourne, and lives in Brisbane. She holds a Bachelor of Creative Arts in Writing and English Literature, First Class Honours and a University Medal in Creative Writing, a Master of Arts in Writing, Editing and Publishing, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing from The University of Queensland. Her first book, The Agonist (UQP 2017), won the 2016 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and the 2018 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal.