Lemons in the Chicken Wire

Winner of the 2015 black&write! Indigenous Writing Fellowship: a partnership between the State Library of Queensland's black&write! Indigenous Writing and Editing Project and Magabala Books.

From a remarkable new voice in Indigenous writing comes this highly original collection of poems bristling with stunning imagery and gritty textures. At times sensual, always potent, Lemons in the Chicken Wire delivers a collage of work that reflects rural identity through a rich medley of techniques and forms.

It is an audacious, lyrical, and linguistically lemon-flavoured poetry debut that possesses a rare edginess and seeks to challenge our imagination beyond the ordinary. Alison Whittaker demonstrates that borders, whether physical or imagined, are no match for our capacity for love.

Teachers' notes available here.

'Whittaker's poems play with vernaculars in a way that renders her poems—in combination with unexpected and fun internal rhythms and rhymes—a wonderful intervention into poetry that bends linguistic family colour colony lines. (Not poetic lines but the invisible lines that reside in a person or in a poem fragment.)' - Elena Gomez, Overland Literary Journal

'The newly published author lays her personal experience bare, breaking down many of the barriers that often shield the community's visibility.' - Bianca Soldani, SBS NITV

Lemons in the Chicken Wire is truly an astounding, proudly experimental, innovative, daring, disjunctive, playful, and unique poetry debut.' - Dr AJ Carruthers, Rabbit Poetry Journal