Winner of the 2017 Helen Anne Bell Poetry Award Highly Commended in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards (2019)
Taking its cues from Rimbaud’s call for the reinvention of love, Subtraction tours the hologrammatic labyrinths of the English language to ask again: What is love? And what does the other want? From the courtly inventions of the letters of Abelard and Heloise through the ‘mystical jaculations’ of thirteenth century saints, to the philosophy and science wars of the latter-day bugs, these poems set out from the immobilising imperatives of loving encounters to inscribe themselves in the archival becoming-truths of their own ceaseless wanderings. Gorging and resisting, feasting and refusing, Subtraction smorgasbords fusional, ablative and illusory accounts of love only to find that literature impedes romantic progress, imprisons hopes, and forestalls invention, so that ‘she who has come to us at last in its pages, loves us no better in real life’. In the process of doing this, it finds new ways of encountering its perilous selves, in the provision of curiously assembled tools with which to measure and to shape.
