Paperback. These poems span streets and gardens, books and films, people and things, creating a landscape that feels both close and surreal.Sometimes the language is sharp, sometimes lavish, each poem a document of life as a waking dream, a relentless exploration of the everyday. Ali Jane Smith writes, 'It is a relief to turn thoughts and feelings into a poem. Sometimes it is like making a chair, and sometimes it is like smashing concrete with a crowbar.' Here, the chair might wobble, the cracks in the concrete twist like rivers. They take you somewhere, or they tell you something. The Strange Matter invites you into a world both familiar and strange, capturing the moments in between catching the bus, looking up at the moon, baking bread, listening to music, spotting onionweed, snacking on Jatz.These poems span streets and gardens, books and films, people and things, creating a landscape that feels both close and surreal. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

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Bibliographic Details

Title: The Strange Matter (Paperback)
Publisher: Gazebo Books
Publication Date: 2025
Language: English
ISBN 10: 1763600912
ISBN 13: 9781763600911
Binding: Paperback
Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

What is the strange matter? It is the plastic milk containers upside-down on someone's fence, the cockroaches making their nightly commute across the bookshelves, the Rusa deer that boards the 53 bus at Wollongong and has thoughts about Wyatt and Gascoigne. It is the morning hour after everyone is fed and dressed and out of the house; the moment of sitting down, the dregs of tea tipped onto earth, the face in the laundry window. In Ali Jane Smith's debut collection, the extraordinary is found not through departure from the ordinary but by staying with it, turning it over with patient, curious hands.

These poems were written on and about Wodi Wodi, Dharawhal, and Yuin Country - the Illawarra coast south of Sydney - and this place seeps through every poem: its bus routes and escarpments, its possums and bluetongue lizards, its suburban shopping centres and sea eagle-watched beaches. Yet the collection is also restlessly intertextual, drawing on Schoenberg and John Cage, Myra Hess and Lauren Jackson, Gascoigne and George Orwell, Tippi Hedren and Janet Leigh, as though attention - to a bus window, a cockroach's gait, a bee tree threatened by chainsaws - requires the company of the whole culture.

Smith's voice is warm, wry, and formally adventurous. She works in sequences, lyrics, semi-dramatic monologues, and permutational repetitions - a poem that reshuffles its own stanzas three times to show thought working over itself. Her tonal range is wide: from elegy to pratfall, from close ecological observation to the sudden entrance of Lauren Jackson into a poem about World War II. What holds everything together is an irrepressible sociability of mind, and a deep conviction that attention to the world as it is - strange, ordinary, pressured, alive - is both an ethical and aesthetic practice.

About the Author

Ali Jane Smith's poems have been published in literary journals, including Southerly, Cordite, Australian Poetry Journal and Overland. She is a Red Room Poetry and Varuna Alumni. In 2018 she was shortlisted for the David Harold Tribe Poetry Prize and in 2016 she was one of three writers selected for the inaugural Sydney Review of Books Emerging Critics program.

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