Fiona Hile, The Family Idiot

In a series of poems that would trace a respectable lineage from Lacan all the way back through Sartre, Mondrian, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Hypatia and Sappho – if only it had any idea what it was talking about – Hile’s The Family Idiot instead asks such ill-advised questions as What is love? Do infinities exist? and, Why don’t the four of us buy that unit over-looking the ocean? Whether you like philosophy, murder, chopsticks or Caravaggio, these are poems the whole idiot can enjoy.

Fiona Hile’s poems have been published in The Age, The Sun-Herald, Shearsman, Hecate, Steamer and Rabbit. “Mondrian Green” was commended in the 2011 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets.