Keri Glastonbury: a note on 51 Alterities
Keri Glastonbury reflects on 51 Alterities (1 August 2025), a collection that satirically reimagines our era of chaos and chicanery. It is her first book since Newcastle Sonnets, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry.
51 Alterities is a self-satirising, digressive, ungovernable chronicle of my inner and outer territories; an autopoetic ledger, blending memoir and late-capitalist misrule. It began as a loose adaptation of UK poet Sam Riviere’s debut collection 81 Austerities (2012) which he wrote in response to the impact of austerity measures on the arts and as a provocation on poetry as a contemporary media in the internet age. Riviere’s 81 Austerities is embedded as a palimpsest in 51 Alterities in a similar way to how my previous collection Newcastle Sonnets was conceived as a riposte to Ted Berrigan’s New York-based The Sonnets (1964) and post-industrial cities. For Riviere, poetry is positioned as a necessary austerity: inherently distilled and deprived, qualities which arguably provide it with adaptive resilience in the face of neo-liberal cost cutting.
When I first read 81 Austerities I was seduced by Riviere’s style, if somewhat alienated by his repeated posturing around online pornography for an assumed male heterosexual gaze: ‘All day I have been watching women / crush ripe tomatoes in their cleavage / whatever you can think of / someone’s already done it’. I wanted to wrestle with the axis of gender and generation, as a female queer poet over a decade older, and now over a decade on.
Midway through writing 51 Alterities I also spent a month on the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands, at Ninuku Arts. This experience of staying in a remote Indigenous community (on the tri-State border of South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory) made me reconsider notions of austerity, and indeed alterity (defined as ‘otherness’), particularly in terms of any claim I could make to the experience of either.
Riviere cites ‘austerity’ as Merriam-Webster’s word of the year in 2010 and in 2024 that word was ‘polarization’. Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year for 2024 was ‘enshitiffication’. I have found myself with an abundance of supporting evidence, and in the interim between the publication of 81 Austerities and 51 Alterities, Leonard Cohen, who famously wrote that ‘deprivation is the mother of poetry’, has died. 51 Alterities is what remains of my lyric voice and what remains for me of poetry as it competes for valency in our increasingly amped-up era of tech broligarchy.
As 51 Alterities neared completion I encountered ChatGPT, a predictive text model with a way bigger vocabulary than me; an ethical and ontological minefield. I was reminded of Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1933) in which he noted how new technologies of his time could potentially serve both revolutionary and reactionary purposes – either awakening critical consciousness or dulling it. Generative AI lines are incorporated in italics into the final series of poems in 51 Alterities as I experimented with becoming a vector for procedural absurdity and avowed trespass using prompts such as: ‘write me a poem in the style of Sam Riviere that imagines a poetry slam between him and Charles Bukowski’. At this point in time, it’s safe to say, both ChatGPT and I failed to imitate Riviere’s style, an ironic statement given Riviere’s recent poetry collection Conflicted Copy (2024) was composed using an early ChatGPT model.
51 Alterities is what remains of my lyric voice and what remains for me of poetry as it competes for valency in our increasingly amped up era of tech broligarchy.
