Winner ALS Gold Medal for Literature 2019 Shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Award 2019 Shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award 2018
'This collection is a fine example of Pam Brown’s larger project, to write a poetry that maps the edges of thought, or—in her words—to think ‘what cannot / be thought’. click here for what we do brings a clarity and precision to language that refracts the everyday into a strangeness with which to examine what we thought we knew. Disjunctions between objects, and the words used to describe them, comingle into a delightful study of the paradox and power of poetry. Like ‘a shimmering mirage of flame’, the extended lengths of these poems, and their short, fragmented lines, suggest that the border between spoken language and poetry is a lot hazier than we might otherwise think. However, Brown’s tremendous skill ensures that, no matter how relaxed, the poems are at once comical, satirical and thoughtful; if the poetry feels ‘as ephemeral / as instagram / as a whisper / as a wink’ is it because Brown knows how to find the most innate structures of poetic expression. Leaving traces of disquiet through extended meditations and wry observation, this is a poetry of movement and stillness, a lived document examining contemporary life in real time, in all its banal glory.' (From the judges' report)
