zenobia frost
Total Eclipse of the Zen
Well! I’m about to go undercover (read: do a lot of poem-writing and grant-applying in bed) to prepare for upcoming festivals and new work. Salt and Bone is ready to launch (!) and I’m ready to zoom up and down the east coast (including a Lushie work retreat in Sydney). Here’s some of what’s coming up:
- Queensland Poetry Festival: Celestial Monsters, 31 Aug @ 11am
Judith Wright Centre shopfront space (FREE): Rachael Briggs and Zenobia Frost have been places humans shouldn’t tread. And they’ve returned with poems, song cycles and the lingering smell of graveyard dirt. - Queensland Poetry Festival: Into the Warmth, 31 Aug @ 1.45pm
Judith Wright Centre performance space (FREE): Poetry can be sung from the rafters, and it can be an intimate act between strangers. Join us for this very special Sunday Poetry Yum Cha session – come in, find a seat, grab a snack, open your ears and your heart. Featuring Candy Royalle, Max Ryan, Cyril Wong, Zenobia Frost and Adam Hadley - Wunderkammer: The launch of Salt and Bone and Curio, 18 Sept @ 6pm
Avid Reader (FREE): Kristin Hannaford and Zenobia Frost co-launch their new WALLEAH PRESS poetry collections. Join us for drinks and nibbles as we celebrate confluence, quolls and possums — and send Hannaford’s CURIO and Frost’s SALT AND BONE into the world. Bookings essential. - National Young Writers Festival: Newcastle, 2–5 Oct
Program launched soon — watch this space. Basically lots of this:
- Salt and Bone: Melbourne launch, 7 Oct
Salt and Bone launches in good company at Hares & Hyenas. Details TBC. - Sleep: Oct–Nov
At last: SALT AND BONE
It’s here! It’s real! It’s got a spine and an ISBN!
Salt and Bone (Walleah Press) will be available for sneaky pre-sales at Queensland Poetry Festival, with a Brisbane launch in mid-September. Then, if I’m lucky, a little touring!
Melbourne-based artist Bettina Marson designed the beautiful front and back covers (and tolerated me emailing her about 340 million photos of curlews being weirdos). I think this cover is about as Brisbane as it gets:
Here are some very nice things that Cordite Poetry Review‘s Kent MacCarter said about Salt and Bone:
“Frost’s are fearless poems, engaging with and confronting the intricacies of our sex-then-life-then-death eddy. Treacle, black pepper and clove, the weight of Atlas: these are poems Bertolt Brecht would delay his first morning coffee or crossword to consume … Their alchemic moods forge a contemporary age of bronze, one that, somehow, already sports your fingerprint embossed into its folds. Salt and Bone is her own Epic Theatre.”
If you’re super-duper keen, you can preorder the collection from Walleah.
Ruckus! (and a poem)
Ruckus! Slam, having left its beloved Hideaway, has found rad new digs at the New Globe Theatre. The Whitny Kapa Band and I feature — and there are 16 coveted open mic spots. See you there at 7pm, 25 June.
In the meantime, I’ve chucked a new recording up on soundcloud for your listening amusement: “Cimetière Des Innocents, 1786” (previously published in Ricochet Magazine). No, I have no idea if I’m pronouncing the French bit right. But the gory details therein are a true story. Human-fat soap. Good times.
Interview with Australian Writer Zenobia Frost
Blogger Geosi Gyasi interviewed me for his blog, Geosi Reads:
Credit: Raw Bones
Brief Biography: Zenobia Frost is an Australian writer and editor whose debut poetry collection, The Voyage, was released in 2009. Zenobia (Brisbane) is the assistant editor of Cordite Poetry Review. Her work has been published in Voiceworks, Overland, Southerly, The Lifted Brow and Rave Magazine. Zenobia was shortlisted in the 2013 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize and won second place in the 2013 John Marsden Prize for Young Australian Writers. Her debut collection, Salt and Bone, is forthcoming from Walleah Press.
Geosi Gyasi: Between Page and Stage, which one is your first love?
Zenobia Frost: Page, I think. Writing poetry was how I learned to be happy with my own company. I can fiddle with one line or one piece of punctuation for hours on end. Sometimes, when I write a new poem, I’m excited to wake up the next morning just to see it with fresh…
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Poem: “Varuna”
five days in
dark rooms begin
to lose their menace
alone or close enough
domestic ghosts
nowhere to be seen
but in the hum
of unfamiliar stillness
this country house
listens
more than speaks
takes notes
stretches out its tall spine
in my room
the ladder to widow’s walk
sighs in upward slumber
there is so much here
of you, Eleanor
this thoroughfare in veneration
of your work
the first book I choose
has your impression
I thought once that I saw you
by the fire
but we aren’t introduced
to one another
and in this quiet
I am looking for stories
In 2012, I spent a week working on my manuscript at Varuna (once the house of Australian author Eleanor Dark), courtesy of CAL.
Poem: “Graveyard Haibun”
(Previously published in Voiceworks #92 ‘THING’)
On Thursday morning I meet Death. We inherit Sydney’s red-dust storm, and our backyard is thick with it. The white cat with the poodle-cut is now auburn. She cleans herself uselessly, tongue moistening dust into clay.
Six am sun casts every gravestone reflective. I never get up this early. I settle on the hot, steady concrete of a grave, and try to learn silence.
Scarlet beetles skitter through dry leaves. Cicadas hum in hollows. Our raised necropolis is more awake than anywhere in this lidded city.
cemetery
spring’s new crows
let sleeping dead lie
I breathe and watch. For a rare moment, my mind too is warm, dark stone.
I go out to feed my flatmate’s old rat and find that his lungs are full of the desert. I sit on the kitchen floor with him in my lap. He is thin-blooded – an aspirin-thief in his youth. Now, his nose has stopped bleeding for the first time in months. Droplets congeal in the dust on his snout. I feel his body cease.
on the floor
we share rigor mortis
The cats sniff around us. They do not interfere.
I return alone, and enter the wilderness without pith helmet or field knife. Birds own the graveyard, swooping for me to turn back; the dead and I are just guests.
If I am very still, I fade into this place. My shadow thickens into my own ghost, leads me down paths that are only pretending. I wouldn’t mind being lost here. (I am already lost.)
hoop pines rise
from the jaws of skeletons
a final word
not that poetry is a trap but prayer
I’ve just finished reading Nathan Curnow’s half of Radar, a 2012 Walleah Press collection shared between Nathan and Kevin Brophy. (The title of this post comes from “Gently Against the Grain”.) Great way to spend a spare sliver of a Tuesday. I should be reading more. Great poetry always reminds me I should be reading more. On to Kevin’s half!
I have some thrilling news I’ve been struggling to keep quiet: a poem of mine has been shortlisted in the Overland Judith Wright Prize for Emerging Writers. It is a wonderful feeling to be included on this list, alongside 11 very talented poets, especially as this is a personally significant poem. Our house-Francis (aka Jeremy Thompson) was shortlisted for this same prize back in 2011; he’d actually forgotten until today, so now I’m doubly pleased. May the odds be ever in our favour, shortlisters!
I’ve been darting back and forth between New Farm and everywhere else this week, with World Theatre Festival on at Brisbane Powerhouse. Thus far I’ve managed to catch All That Fall (Pan Pan Theatre), JiHa Underground (Motherboard Productions) and She Would Walk the Sky (Company 2). Here’s my review of the latter for The Guardian UK (the show is on its way to London after Brisbane) and here’s my friend Nerissa’s Arts Hub review. And here’s an overview/preview of WTF14 Tahnee Robinson and I cooked up for Theatre People.
Make sure you catch at least something at this innovative festival! I’ve never experienced anything like All That Fall, which I think I’d categorise as “listening theatre”. Audience members sat together in rocking chairs (I took the photo above to show you) and listened to Samuel Beckett’s first radio play commissioned for the BBC. I’ve heard The Great Spavaldos is a unique experience, putting you in the role of trapeze artist via, I presume, immersive science-magic. She Would Walk the Sky experiments with Brisbane Powerhouse’s wonderful and challenging spaces (read both reviews above to read some contrasting thoughts on that).
In other news, I have an essay on consent and ethical nonmonogamy included in the upcoming Sex Issue of The Lifted Brow, which you can pre-purchase here (or, if you’re in Brisbane, at Avid Reader after March 1). There’ll be launches in Melbourne and Sydney early in March, too. 88 pages of awesome writing by awesome writers (and also me). Woooo!
Zen x
P.S. I have bought a stack of crafting supplies and I am super excited to start creating horrifying regresty-able works of art for friends (and maybe also some poetry crafts). Stay tuned for BROOCHBACK MOUNTAIN.
Poem: “Brisbane haiku”
accordion’s squall
twisting through bunched streets
crow’s neck distends
unexpected rain
the humid walls exhale
roast queenslander
slick black umbrella
bounces at a snapped joint
fallen bat
toowong traffic yawns
ghost-tram arrives earlier
than council bus
crowded station
arched spines against metal
bare tracks curve away
backyard mangoes
swell, yellow and fall
in your absence
bushland
ironbarks one by one
telephone pole
Francis Thompson and Zenobia Frost
First printed in Petrichor, 2011
Poem: “Finding/Losing”
This is the land of your poems.
The trees covet sky and water;
droplets leap from miles up
and wash away our windshield.
This road is overwhelmed, bumping
its shoulders with the ankles of trees
who don’t perceive the winding below.
We slip by unnoticed,
too small to be considered
anything but ground dwellers
snuffling for mushrooms.
Really, we are here to gather ourselves.
We pass seven cordoned rockfalls:
a sign to scratch off the seven days
we have gathered like barnacles.
We hide in the scent of the forest,
relearning stillness with a quiet engine.
Zenobia Frost and Francis Thompson (in collaboration)
First printed in Petrichor, 2011
Zenobia Frost 