Regulator

(Paperback)

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The poems in Regulator reveal an observant eye and an acute ear; the language is evocative, precise and sensuous. There are poems of the natural world, bristling with death and transformation, and of the everyday/dangerous laboratory. In Benjamin Dodds' childhood Australia, the Virgin Mary, painted in All Weather Exterior blue, fades in the Riverina sun; 'dangerously adolescent men/in wet sucking board-shorts' bomb into the irrigation canal; a sweat-stained rural Santa hands out packs of Twisties. Under the surface, the insistent pulse of sexuality, an undertow of dread, a glint of subtle menace. -Tricia Dearborn Dodds examines the real Australia where the small, flat human incident might disappear in such monstrous immensity, where aliens might choose to pass by-a naturally surreal world. This is a place to band together or be sucked into nightmare and float out into awful space, a place where only the intimacy of human contact keeps us grounded. This is poetry that reads like a novel, the characters alive and waving to us from the page. -Rhyll McMaster