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Raw Materials

Raw Materials

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Author: Astrid Lorange

Publisher: Atelos (2024)

Raw Materials takes three of Australia's top selling commodity exports--gas, beef, and iron--as the point of departure for three interconnected poem-essays. Each poem-essay attempts a reading of the raw material as a figure for understanding a companion structure or system: gas is read alongside gender, beef alongside settler sovereignty, and iron alongside ideology. Together, the three texts connect at various points inside the body of the author - in blood, fantasy, and identity - and build towards a autobiographical study of a life articulated by the most minor and the most epic material conditions. Each poem-essay develops a structure of argumentation application only to itself: in this sense, it borrows from the essay form a mode of rhetorical certainty, and from the poem a tendency towards, if not the irrational or illogical, then certainly the counterrational or counterlogical.