In 2021 Evelyn Araluen’s debut collection of poems, Dropbear, dropped on the literary world like an incendiary device. It was shortlisted for three Premier’s literary prizes and won the Stella prize – the first book of poetry to do so – as well as the small publishers’ adult book of the year in the Australian Book Industry Association awards. That’s a pretty extraordinary reception for any first book, let alone a debut collection of poems.
It’s easy to see why. Araluen’s poetic drills down to the nerve with a lyric intelligence that is as tough as steel. In Dropbear, she turned a scorching gaze on icons of Australian literature – Banjo Paterson, Blinky Bill, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie – and rewrote the mythos of colonial nationhood, reinstating its erased Indigenous presence. “What use is witness at the end of worlds?” she asked.
The Rot extends this question and its responses. Araluen’s lyric here drives into the very cell, amping up into lines that are sometimes unbearable in their complex tensions. Her headlong language – the ferocity of its anger and sorrow – impels you from one poem to the next. You return again (and again) to reckon with its difficult, seductive beauty, its deadly analyses, its poised wit, its wicked complexities, its desolations and joys.
The Rot is an experiential plunge into the nightmare of the present moment, as seen through two centuries of colonisation on this continent. Dark though it is – as dark as our times – it is not hopeless. The book is dedicated to “my girls, and the world you will make”: Araluen looks to the “Long Future”, a term coined by the Unangax̂ scholar Prof Eve Tuck, for what can be imagined for those who survive colonisation – contingent and elusive as that future might be. At the core of this collection’s bitter truths beats a sublime tenderness.
The Rot is divided into three sections – Holdings, Fragments on Rotting, and Unfoldings – that inscribe an intellectual and emotional journey towards a possibility of resistance and justice amid the totalising catastrophe of late capitalism. The livestreamed horrors of Gaza is a faultline that runs through all the experiences – personal, virtual, imagined, literary, intellectual – that inhabit the book.
Araluen traverses the symptoms of dis-ease – insomnia, exhaustion, debt – where “[w]hatever time is left was / ransomed from drowning islands in / the Pacific”. Her sardonic eye notes the fake emancipation of the girlboss, in Girl Work! – “the latest shipment of micro-aggro / extractions just landed and / we need someone to macro-manage /quality control in the holocene” – and the empty compensations of consumerisms, in Blood Wash – “have you tried / something more / to not afford? … actually you are angry / all that shaving / all that starving”.
The long middle section plunges into “the rot”, quoting Chaucer’s The Reeve’s Tale: “till we be roten / kan we not be ripen”. Here, among many other things – there are always many other things – Araluen explores “the girlshaped thing”, formed in the violences of history and culture, who must live in the “always at-once project of becoming and unbecoming woman”; as well as the hauntologies of desire, the present moments haunted by bitter pasts and lost futures: “You found it easier to imagine yourself a dead girl desired than a living woman loved.”
Several poems named 256GB of Salvaged Memory are a kind of mental genealogy, attempting to catalogue the billion bytes of information that manifest into a subjectivity – from the Brontës to “decontextualised fragments of Sontag, Plath, Carson, Angelou”, to the “codename index for a spreadsheet charting the doctors and case workers least likely to send in the cops”, to Jeff Bezos’s wedding: “Venice drowned beneath the weight of ninety-six private jets.”
This accounting is placed against the “Long Future”, a concept that “gave you a hand to hold through the frailty / of your own visions”, and a map for possible survival: “get a few weeks of decent sleep”.
“Unfoldings”, the final section, is at once celebration, mourning and resolve. “How you gonna kill the cop in / your head if you won’t sleep long / enough to see the whites of her eyes?” she writes in Instructions on Getting a Gun. The joyous Glory be the Girlypop summons the anarchy and vitality of those who do not forgive their mothers “the crimes of what was done to her to make us like this” but do mourn them, who attempt to reckon with the “inheritance of grief” that is the inevitable cost of being a girl. This hurricane of a book finishes with a vow, a poem called I Will Love that wills love into existence against everything that throttles its possibility: “Grow seed in the ash / from this rot grow love … until love kills you you will love.”
But all this is an inadequate sketch of the movements in The Rot, which resists almost every gloss you might put on it. This is a book that can’t be paraphrased, which perhaps is the only real definition of a poem. Read it for yourself. For your selves.
The Rot by Evelyn Araluen is out now in Australia (UQP $24.99)
