Author: Sue Hall Pyke

How to write such a book and not dissolve? How to read such a book and be able to respond to what lies at its core, the beauty, the ravaging relations. I am prey, this work hunt me down, jags me raw.

Epiphanies, familiar and specific to each moment. Decades devoted to staying close, staying quiet, opening to the sweep-through of awe. The slip of black snakes, the sniff of a doe sensing the life of her fawn. A call to meditate, to drift.

A sisterly recommendation, this book that bursts with the colour of music. Thinking through notes and passing the harms white culture can do. Tensions between mother and daughter and masculinist pain and the liberation of women free to play their own tune.

Things chatter all the time, and this book that takes that  truth seriously, takes me where I want to go, takes as a fungi the vibrant DNA, of books, books that they join with readers, becoming part of a greater imaginative body.

This:

‘Gama yarga

why you keep me awake

is to teach me I am not alone

Guwany

why you keep me awake

is the night like day to you

Gibam garandalehn

why you keep me awake

what am I still to do’

(101)

Cara Romera is perfectly flawed. ‘Look, I committed some errors.’ (!85). Her voice rings clear as a bell, and her heart is just as strong. Fills out government forms as they deserve. Dream neighbour if you’re not possessive of your loved ones.

A tight-woven ‘unruly load’ (286). Life as data, written here through different prismatic perspectives that cohere into masculinist power. Quantifiable memory, packaged into commodities to suit a market that never stops reinventing. What gets forgotten, what gets remembered in the ‘memorevolution’ (281).

A cool refreshing entry up and down the black lines into the cruel forgetting times. A toe dip then a drowning for writers with mothers they love, mothers who love to talk the past. ’You broke her heart. And you wrote’ (213).

This is nothing but the story of how it is, the work of ‘meat-speak’ (18). This is must-speak to the atrocity of the acceptable, laid out in ‘tiny pieces of glass’ (81) splat, in the face of such violent lack of outrage.

Grasses as invasive as rabbits, blackberries (246). Victoria’s southwest coast, held down. Paris, uprisings. A poetic engineer wracking the ‘violence of excessive infrastructure’ (263). The truth: ‘as we attempt to rectify our old mistakes we are destined to make new ones’ (299).