Author: Sue Hall Pyke

Political grace, comprehensively argued, to the songbook of Derrida, Foucault and Girard. Harmony with Adams, descant with Haraway. Depicts nonhuman resistance in prose that weeps. Inspired call for a move beyond sacrificial eating. A day of truce from killability, following Andrea Dworkin.

Pecking (new) order

99 titles a poem. 99 short furious flashes of fiction. Truths. 49. “One should not define God in human language” but rather descend “ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing.” Then 73’s divine that stays away from the lonely world of humans.

Relational growth that illuminates ‘different levels of light’ and ‘dimensions’ (30) through the artworking of Australia’s first people in ‘an unstable world where the only thing you can definitively claim as your own is the country in which you were born’ (97).

An appreciation of synchrony and the necessity and treachery of witness beyond the ‘great monad’ of capital (69). The transformative energy of matter, in all ‘families’, including ‘mechanical, calorific, electrical, chemical, rays, nuclear’ and perhaps ‘spiritual’ (36). The matter of humans included.

Ghost story for these times. ‘Woooo-oooooh.’ Extractions from the numismatics of capital. ‘Remember you must live …most love…mist leaf’ (30, 237). Life is exchange. I reluctantly close the borrowed hard cover, with joy find a copy at an opshop within the month.

Man-boy scouting anthropomorphism as a form of understanding the shared self within the newt, the toad, the snake. In uncanny pond magnetics the slimy scale of nonhuman othering. Our self hurts like the clipping of a toe in the name of science.

The brutality of  meat as family, covered in the beauty of flowers, of stubborn trees. This in a patriarchal hot house that scorches life to death.  Perhaps ‘this, finally, might help you understand what the nation really was’ (201). The book closes.

No explicit mention of a hurting colonised land. That story is told by kookaburras. Their busy singularity. They kill a snake as a team. Use their beaks to pulverize a rat in its skin until it’s ready to eat. I mourn Tiny.

The cream white pain of a girl-woman’s skin, fleshed up and ready for scarring. The smirched recurring dreams of parents caught in their own traps. Claustrophobic love, ‘grubby and slippery and desperate’ (258). The First Floor Ladies Restroom only a temporary escape.

This gruesome witchy tale made me want to hide my cauldron. Or seek the needled poppet that makes my joints stiff and sore. Sparse writing and deep historical acuity makes current gender relations seem louse-ridden and dangerously power-laden. No Samantha in sight.