Save As

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 of place: using 'landscape' to furnish a poem with picturesque imagery; with the promise of some lasting beautiful elsewhere—'mea culpa's last egotism: lazy planetary leave-taking'. This is a principled, truthful, fiercely intelligent collection. — Lisa Gorton

In poetry lucid and compelling, Save As bears clear-eyed witness to the warfare waged against the planet by the captains and footsoldiers of industry. A record of environmental degradation, a tally of mounting human debts, and a catalogue of ghosts, both familial and communal, this collection is an uncompromising vision of our contemporary moment, and a moving elegy for what has been lost, and what is being lost—devastatingly, irretrievably—in the calamitous present. — Bella Li