Overview

Otopos unfurls a paradox: the interleaving and entangling of self and topos. It began with a loss of equilibrium impelling rhythmic departures, an incipient blood beat-- subcutaneous, through the feet all the way to the surface of the page. A Belgian native, I live and write on unceded Wurundjeri land in an inner-city suburb of Melbourne. This makes me a paradox. An unsettled European out of place in a neighbourhood she calls home with its fenced, stolen and, too often, desecrated land. Who bears witness to political abstractions and aberrations yet fails to wholly reimagine or rematerialize these through poetry despite her attempt to uncover the regimes of terror of settlement perpetrated by the symbolic. Whose breath catches again and again. Otopos is a reckoning, an elegy, an ode to the Merri Creek trail that snakes through Melbourne's northern suburbs and colluvial slopes, teaming with native flora and fauna, but also imported weeds and predators, including humans. In its arrangement in three parts, the collection unfolds displaced fragments and glimpses of histories through call and response of landscapes and beings. The poetics active here is a poetics of the liminal: from word to word, line to line, space to space the narrative persona writes its shoreless existence, roaming as it does through lexicons and topographies.

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9781957372143

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"In rhythms and tones that feel chromatic and at other times symphonic, the poems of Otopos compose the layered language of one at home, yet out of place, in her adopted wondrous, and ravaged land. In this topography imbued ""with flesh and soul,"" the imagination shimmers, and memory shapes itself as prayer. Dominique Hecq's voice is that of the shifting creek, reveling in the splendor of a land in which everything is alive, facing down its senseless violence, and witnessing what yearns and sometimes yields to the ""music of the heart."" These poems--generative, vibrant, and necessary--are an intimate embrace of the topographic world within us. William O'Daly, author of The New Gods and translator of Pablo Neruda's Book of Twilight --Hecq, Dominique"

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