The Oblong Plot

Shortlisted, NSW Literary Awards 2025, Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry

Moving nimbly between the granular and the broad view, The Oblong Plot, Chris Andrews' third collection, takes in paint splotches on a sawhorse and a star named Fang, life-wasting systems and means of escape. These faceted, echoing poems observe the world's shifting arrangements while rearranging their own letters, sounds, syllables, words and lines. The Oblong Plot invites the reader to join in its serious play.

'I loved this exhilarating, brilliant book. The poems in The Oblong Plot have style and wit to burn, and strike like a tuning fork, reverberating and reshaping the air around us. They are sharply attuned to the ironies and absurdities of contemporary life, finding linguistic torque and wry humour in cityscapes and their inhabitants' waking lives, dreams and aspirations. In seemingly effortless but technically dazzling syllabics, time and again Andrews punctures through the surface of things to find something much stranger and more surreal sitting under the day's skin. He is a relentlessly surprising and inventive poet whose vast linguistic gifts—including an electrifying skill at toggling between the vernacular and the poetically charged, "between / the dreamwarp and the cybercapsule"—remind us that language can both unmake and remake the world around us. The Oblong Plot is a gift to all who turn to poetry seeking to find our language recharged and refreshed.' - Sarah Holland-Batt