Moon Wrasse

Moon Wrasse is a voyage through transformation and disenfranchised grief: parenthood ambivalence, queer infertility, female-to-male gender transition from the perspective of a life partner; a navigation of identity in a time of climate crisis. It is also a love song to reading in the dialogic tradition of the lyric mode. Alert to questions of intersubjectivity and 'what shapes us', these poems arise from encounters with Australian and international poets—chief among them, Denise Levertov and Rainer Maria Rilke—as well as with contemporary philosophy and science, popular music, and ecological non-fiction.

These are poems that speak back, speak to, read with, and whisper alongside; that seek to sing the emergent self into being. They are deeply engaged with the notion that we are shaped by the voices around us as well as those we carry within.

Moon Wrasse is bounteous, sinuous, and queer, haunting in its embrace of grief, shifting identities, and transformation at both personal and planetary levels. The poems create a supple chemistry between the visceral and the uncanny through various transformational exchanges across animal, vegetable, and mineral ecospheres. Here is an invigorating fertility of voice, especially notable in the book's agile sonics, its hum of presence, and its ardent dialogue with other poets and writers. This is a striking and richly lyrical debut, vibrant in its singing, intensely mobile, and compelling in its recuperative gestures. - Jill Jones

Willo Drummond's poetry is exhilarating for its balance of the visceral, the intuitive, and the intellectual. Intimate and tender experience is framed and reframed with deep reading both of other poets' work and the more-than-human world, in innovative ways. - Felicity Plunkett