Trigger Warning

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

From award-winning and highly acclaimed author and poet Maria Takolander comes her most impressive and personal poetry collection yet. Trigger Warning is not for the fainthearted, but neither are the elemental realities of domestic violence and environmental catastrophe that these astonishing poems address. Comprised of three sections, the first summons a difficult personal history by conversing with poets - from Sylvia Plath to Anne Carson - whose dramatised confessions trigger Takolander's own. The second part remains focused on the domestic, while redeeming that scene of trauma through a reinventing wit. The final section of this extraordinary book turns its attention outside, playing with poetry itself in order to confront the Anthropocene and the final frontier of death. This is poetry that balances ruthlessness and lyrical beauty; poetry alive to its time and audience; poetry not to be missed.

Reviews

'Unusual and fiercely intelligent, Trigger Warning will simultaneously unsettle you and set you alight.' --The Weekend Australian
"The poems in Trigger Warning take no prisoners; fiercely intelligent, mordant and uncompromising, they stare down difficult subjects - domestic violence, the body's frailty, the precarious future - with an unerring commitment to telling the truth, no matter the fallout. Whether sparring with confessional poets in spiky epistles, reconfiguring the seemingly banal surface of the domestic world, or divining the apocalyptic excesses of the late Anthropocene, Takolander fearlessly contemplates 'the battleground of reason's end, ' forging sense in a sea of senselessness. Enlivened with wit and leavened with irony, Takolander's poems are electrifying; their intellectual force is indisputable.' --Sarah Holland-Batt

Author Bio

Maria Takolander was born in Melbourne in 1973 to Finnish parents. She is the author of three previous poetry collections, including Ghostly Subjects (Salt, 2009), which was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. Her poetry appeared regularly in The Best Australian Poems and The Best Australian Poetry, and it has been widely anthologised nationally and internationally, including in Thirty Australian Poets (UQP, 2011). A program about Maria's poetry aired on Radio National in 2015, and she has performed her poetry on ABC TV and at numerous festivals, including the 2017 Medellin International Poetry Festival in Colombia. She won the inaugural Australian Book Review Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, and her short-story collection The Double (Text, 2013) was shortlisted for The Melbourne Prize for Literature Best Writing Award. Maria's words can also be found on bronze plaques in the Geelong CBD and at the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria.