Otopos

Otopos unfurls a paradox: the interleaving and entanglingof self and topos. It began with a loss of equilibriumimpelling rhythmic departures, an incipient blood beat--subcutaneous, through the feet all the way to the surfaceof the page. A Belgian native, I live and write on uncededWurundjeri land in an inner-city suburb of Melbourne.This makes me a paradox. An unsettled European outof place in a neighbourhood she calls home with itsfenced, stolen and, too often, desecrated land. Who bearswitness to political abstractions and aberrations yet failsto wholly reimagine or rematerialize these through poetrydespite her attempt to uncover the regimes of terror ofsettlement perpetrated by the symbolic. Whose breathcatches again and again.Otopos is a reckoning, an elegy, an ode to the MerriCreek trail that snakes through Melbourne's northernsuburbs and colluvial slopes, teaming with native flora andfauna, but also imported weeds and predators, includinghumans. In its arrangement in three parts, the collectionunfolds displaced fragments and glimpses of historiesthrough call and response of landscapes and beings. Thepoetics active here is a poetics of the liminal: from wordto word, line to line, space to space the narrative personawrites its shoreless existence, roaming as it does throughlexicons and topographies.