A. Frances Johnson

Controlled Burn is an antipastoral collection with a difference. Poems closely and compassionately situate woman at the centre of interconnected legacies of colonial, economic, domestic, and military violence. Images of fire, heat, and ecological degradation thread through free-verse, localist poems such as 'The Woman Who Ran the Farm', 'Aqua Nullius', and 'Petroleum', chronicling devastating impacts. Elsewhere, poems such as 'Painted...

Martin Johnston wrote, 'If out of our quarrels with ourselves we make poetry, what do we make of our quarrels with Canberra?' Save As works to see these things together: memoir, elegy, politics, and a feeling for earth. Its poems are everywhere complicated—doubled back on themselves—by A. Frances Johnson's excoriating awareness of how 'poetic' language is complicit in the commodification...