An excerpt from Tongue by Kathryn Crowcroft
A hybrid work of lyric nonfiction, and the debut book by a brilliant Australian poet and scholar, Tongue by Kathryn Crowcroft (Giramondo, 2026) speaks to urgent contemporary conversations about gendered violence and control, intergenerational silence, and the politics of testimony. The text is accompanied by images, including historical illustrations, engravings, paintings and handwritten notes. Read an excerpt from the book below.
Slip
Years ago, when I decided to look into the mouth, I sent my passport away and it returned with a vignette that read LEAVE TO ENTER. The vignette had featureless sand-coloured pages on either side and was made of an obscure kind of paper that caused the photograph of my face to appear transparent and glassy. Small tendrils of purple and green snaked around the outside of the slip. Below them, numbers indicated a window of time during which I could leave the place I was and enter another country where my research would take place. The window was thirty days, but there was no indication if the day I received the vignette – or the day I would arrive there – counted within this frame. I figured I probably had more like twenty-eight days or twenty-nine days or somewhere between them, approximately one phase of the moon; the summon and release of an ovum from my body. I said the words to myself – LEAVE TO ENTER – and had the sense that speech was a carriage into darkness, that darkness could be a concentrated speech place where multiple senses might flourish.
I learned moreover through the Department of Home Affairs that I could, in time, be granted LEAVE TO REMAIN. I heard the way the meanings splintered like a riddle – revealed and occluded. I wondered, too, how anyone unaccustomed to English would comprehend the legal crux of these words.
Listening makes a presence as strong as speech. More powerful than any word at a physical level might be the wordless experience of the tongue. It became my basis, not so much a voice as a certain kind of ear; not finding words exactly but leaning inward more, towards the sensations that motivate words into shapes. I packed what little I had and made my preparations to use the slip.
