51 Alterities

Special offer on two books by Keri Glastonbury

In 51 Alterities by Keri Glastonbury, an incisive observer of Australian cultural life returns with a collection that satirically reimagines our era of chaos and chicanery.

 ‘the republic of letters / a veritable la la land’ writes Keri Glastonbury in 51 Alterities, a collection in which cacophony rhymes with simplicity, and device notifications rebound across the desert horizon. In her poems ‘nepo boys are punching above their weight’, haunted by the ‘spectres of unreal estate’; the senate estimate’s axe ‘falls in aggregates of joy’ while budgies in their natural habitat have ‘no idea they are suburban pretty boys’.

Keri Glastonbury’s previous collection Newcastle Sonnets was written as a riposte to Ted Berrigan’s New York-based The Sonnets, and 51 Alterities began too as a loose adaptation, of British poet Sam Riviere’s influential 2012 debut 81 Austerities. Riviere’s collection was written in response to the impact of conservative UK austerity measures on the arts, and as a reconsideration of the function of poetry in the internet age. Wrestling with Antipodean ‘alterity’ more than ten years later, as a female queer poet a decade older than Riviere’s millennial male, Glastonbury’s 51 Alterities responds to the persistent threat of economic austerity, and to poetry’s precarious place in a landscape dominated by billionaire tech bros and social media empires.

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51 Alterities is cultural diarising and salty, gorgeous critique at its best; this poetry glides through and collapses time to bring us elegant bricolage that gathers, flips and spins the internet we feed at, arriving repeatedly at the uncommon (but entirely welcome) nexus of playfully arch and relaxed. It’s electric; slinging us observational side-eye, and stirring up glorious bite.
Melinda Bufton

In these snappy poems, contemporary life is often an experience of media and technology, celebrity, and commercial debris of the 20th and 21st centuries. Here are 51 interested and curious accounts of alienation from this life, replete with the poet’s affective responses to it. Ironically, in affirming the oddness of it all, the collection may be grounding to those of us feeling washed out by the disorienting tides of the now.
Prithvi Varatharajan

While Glastonbury might not be O’Hara-esque per se, her poems offer some of the same aesthetic pleasures through their use of an ironic, often humorous tone that might be termed ‘camp’.
David McCooey, Australian Book Review

An eclectic and enjoyable mix of irreverent blues matched with sonorous syntax… Glastonbury once again presents an urgent voice that speaks to the crisis of contemporary times.
Elizabeth Walton, ArtsHub