Launch speech: Chris Brown on 51 Alterities by Keri Glastonbury

The Newcastle Writers Festival’s spring program commenced with the launch of Keri Glastonbury’s latest collection, 51 Alterities. Here, we publish Chris Brown’s launch speech, delivered at Watt Space Gallery in September 2025.

You can wait and hope for a book of poetry like a follow up album from your favourite band at fifteen. But poetry’s produced in quiet places and, not knowing when that book might materialise, there’s a thrill at the announcement of its imminent release.

Both the anticipation of reading Keri Glastonbury’s 51 Alterities and the calibre of the work itself, saw me read it cover to cover in a single go.  

The poetry begins with the title, a brilliant appropriation of the book to which Alterities in part responds, English poet Sam Riviere’s Austerities. It’s that gesture (the little slip, the substitution of the one phoneme) that counts here. Austerities becomes Alterities, implying a need for difference, for something other, but in the rhyming inseparability of the two titles, austerity (suggesting the neoliberal cutting of public services) and alterity cohere, the latter representative of the increasing otherness of institutional systems to our sensibilities.

Alterity, in this definition, takes on a range of forms: in “there it is the moon” it’s a soulless post-Whitlam rationalism fed down to personal impact (‘the senate estimate’s axe…igniting a séance of workplace grievance’); in the lines ‘poets take flight like privileged pigeons otherwise occulted from the public square’, it is, at once, the cultural elevation of the artist and the marginalisation of the arts and humanities. More confoundingly perhaps it’s the warping of once familiarities – of freedom, or political radicalism, or of feminism, for example, by ‘turf’ fascists.

In a neat pairing of Socrates and American poet, Frank O’Hara, Keri writes: ‘Yes I know how to live variously’, and while this might be the case for the poem’s speaker, it clearly isn’t the case for the wider (and I mean very narrow) culture in which we live. In “capable of hitting the accelerator”, we read, ‘Now I hear a horse and cart’; and putting a line about the times we live in with a line about how we feel about it, we could say that both a cultural regressiveness and the apparent validity of antiquated ideas lands us in a ‘different depression era’.   

The poem “Triggering Town”, from 2005 (for me a revelatory introduction to Keri’s poetry) explores tensions of desire between queer and heterosexual contexts; ‘and your alterity is all that’, the speaker states, in section three of that poem. These questions of queer identity and perceived alterity resonate into the collection here.

We encounter alterity in different forms, though it’d be mad to think of any collection of Keri’s poetry as a catalogue of estrangements or necessary indictment of culture because Keri’s poems are about as culturally connected as any I can think of. While the lines ‘I plod along seeking content that I don’t share because I’m well able to perform to an audience of one’ and ‘semiotic misconduct in closed circuits’ suggest an isolation inherent in ways to a writing life, (extending to marginalised poetry cultures), they equally parody a kind of solipsism that’s just never there in this work, which is characterised, rather, by this deep cultural connectedness; indeed, this is perhaps the most colourful and incisive cultural referentiality you’ll find in Australian poetry.

Melinda Bufton refers to Keri’s work as ‘cultural diarising at its best’; it’s a term that seems remarkably apt – in its juxtaposition of ‘culture’ with ‘diarising’, and the daily writing of self the latter term implies. The poems say so much about culture, they critique culture, but so much of personal experience, feeling, and attitude is registered here via culture, as if self and identity emerge for us only, or least most clearly, in that relation.

We read that ‘rounded vowel landlords refuse to let tenancy destroy the poetics of a bathroom window staring out to sea.’ In a reference to the Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, we find: ‘The genre purists still admirably / packing up the folding chairs / just don’t jump on the back of that Triumph’. The protection of the bathroom window staring out to sea undermines a romantic disposition, not separate in this case from power and privilege. The exhortation ‘just don’t jump…on the Triumph’ subverts the indignation of the purist’s aversion to change, an apparent moral coup.

We read of ‘Melbourne millennials opening like a skylight at the Guggenheim Bilbao’, an incredible image, and one that undercuts art culture’s exceptionalism and pomp. Meanwhile pastoralist romances are met with: ‘why walk at all when there’s no pond’. Examples of critique such as these give way to the indirect expression of Keri’s aesthetic: a resistance to myth-making, a staunch refusal to exalt the writer or poetry, and a concomitant grounding of poetry as a quotidian and everyday practice, a ‘modus vivendi’, or way of living.    

At times the cultural and personal are presented side-by-side: Bruce Chatwin is ‘outside the bandwidth of my aesthetic acumen’ unlike Robyn Davidson’s Tracks. Elsewhere Keri writes: ‘While The Guardian racks up comments / we still have our apercu right’. Cultural diarising encompasses both critique and a writing of self.    

51 Alterities also alerts us to aspects of Keri’s process, something I’m very interested in, seeing that I see in her work this terrific facility for poetic production, and that I have this idea that as soon as she sets her mind to a book, it isn’t long before it happens. I’ll leave questions about the specific development of the book until later but focus for a moment on practice and method. The line ‘the décor is also traceable / to the source’ suggests a process of collection and arrangement, of things ‘registered’ in a ‘mode of accrual’. As much as there’s a suggestion of careful placement and organisation in the humour of ‘fatigue wielding a soldering iron’, there’s also a poetic openness to randomness and contingency; the five lines of ‘who knew it’s trebled not tripled’ evoke the intrusive cultural reach of trivia and incident, but they also say something about a random and non-programmatic consumption (beyond the self-selected series or podcast, say.) There’s an openness to chance where conjunctions link startling disparity and spontaneity is an essential part of process: ‘worlds cups are won by mere deflection’.

51 Alterities is recognisable for its illuminating critique of cultures that estrange us, for its irony and humour, for a renewed emphasis on line and lineation, and the richness of a diction accruing sonic effect in so many of the passages here. While the writing of poetry may mean ‘reclaiming unhinged mode to bust…task paralysis’, the poetry here reminds us that there is, after all, in this world, an assuring sobriety and intelligence, alongside the effervescing ‘departmental Kool Aid’.   

I want to finish by thanking Keri for the opportunity to speak about her book tonight, to introduce it to a Newcastle audience, to celebrate it, with you, as a brilliant addition to a deeply impressive body of work; on that note, I recognise that this is not an oeuvre that veers from an early traditionalism into millennial experimentalism. There’s a wonderfully consistent attitude and aesthetic at work here, brought to us in shifting forms and modes, across decades. This is an important part of the work’s integrity. As it goes out to readers, I wish 51 Alterities every success.

Thank you.