Writer In Conversation — Shastra Deo about her book, The Exclusion Zone
Saturday, 23 November, 11:00-12:30 PM
correspondences Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country 39 Sydney Road Bulleke-bek (Brunswick) VIC
Join Correspondences for a conversation with Meanjin/Brisbane-based writer, poet and editor Shastra Deo, who will join via video hook-up to talk about her stunning book of poetry, The Exclusion Zone. Inspired by Shastra’s choose-your-own-adventure poem in the book, ‘It Survives’, an interactive conversation involving guests is planned.
To join, please RSVP via the event page. Attendance is free.
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About The Exclusion Zone
You don’t remember this place. This land could be
arid or hungry or wet or rot. That does not matter. Your memory
can’t tell you what no longer exists.
Beginning in the nuclear waste deposits of our future, The Exclusion Zone bears witness in a language degrading faster than the radioactive byproducts of our history and our present. At once prophecy and annihilation, these poems speak with ghosts, questioning how our words – and what they seek to preserve – can contend with the inevitability of their own decay. Nuclear materials drift throughout this collection, metastasising and resisting their own disposal. The Exclusion Zone is a poetry of warning, of séance, of incantation – a poetry of what survives, where the apocalypse-to-be manifests in human tenderness and vulnerability.
—The Exclusion Zone Publisher UQP, 2023 © Shastra Deo
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About Shastra Deo
Shastra Deo was born in Fiji, raised in Melbourne, and lives in Brisbane. Her first book, The Agonist (UQP 2017), won the 2016 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and the 2018 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. Her second book, The Exclusion Zone (UQP 2023), was longlisted for the 2024 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. She is still living.
Image credits: Shastra Deo Photograph: Kate Lund Cover of The Exclusion Zone Publisher UQP, 2023 © Shastra Deo
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