Evelyn Araluen on ‘Dropbear’: First Book Club

“Particularly after the hellish year we’ve just had, poetry makes the burden of existence a lot nicer.”

Each month we celebrate an Australian debut release of fiction or non-fiction in the Kill Your Darlings First Book Club. For March that debut is Dropbear by Evelyn Araluen, out now from the University of Queensland Press.

Dropbear is an innovative mix of poetry and prose that confronts the tropes and iconography of an unreconciled nation, and interrogates the complexities of colonial and personal history. With an alternately playful, tender and mournful voice, Dropbear is a witness to the entangled present, an uncompromising provocation of history, and an embattled but redemptive hope for a decolonial future.

First Book Club host Ellen Cregan spoke with Evelyn for an online event in partnership with Yarra Libraries. Our theme song is Broke for Free’s ‘Something Elated’.

Further reading:

Read Ellen Cregan’s review of Dropbear in our March books Roundup.

Read Evelyn’s Shelf Reflection on her reading habits and the writing that inspires her.

Buy a copy of the book from Brunswick Bound.

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