Anupama Pilbrow, Body Poems (dB3)
Body Poems collects the body, in its total glory and filthiness, and gleefully displays it in 15 grotesque poems. They are joyful poems about the body. They are unapologetically violent and paranoid and dark poems about the body. They are flippant and sensual and funny poems about the body. They are simple and easy-to-read and surprising poems about the body. They are poems best read on an empty stomach. In Body Poems, things happen simultaneously. The tender is brutal, the brutal tender. You are allowed to be disgusting and you are allowed to be delicious. Here beauty arrives in the most surprising disguises. This is a dizzying, fearless collection.
'Anupama’s work has a cool fearlessness that is utterly spellbinding. To engage with her work is to enter a room in the house of poetry where no-one has to keep their voice down—where ideas of what a poet is ‘allowed’ to write about no longer apply. When we spend time with work like this, we learn how much there is to be gained from writing that is willing to be both beautiful and unapologetic.' Alice Allan.
'In Body Poems, Anupama Pilbrow turns her wildly estranging eye on the site of all human experience: the body. For the fizzing consciousnesses that we encounter in these cultivated blurts, ecstasy ominously augurs derangement, innocence is always abutted by menace, and beauty arrives in the most surprising disguises. These are poems that will not sit still in class. Metabolising the cerebral and the sensual into a richly surreal potpourri, Body Poems takes a scalpel to the skins we inhabit and the minds abiding therein, only to find that when cut, they bleed maggots and rainbows. It’s a pleasure to read poetry so funny, so poignant and so gleefully grotesque, and to lurch whatever which way it takes us.' - Gerard Elson.
Anupama Pilbrow co-edits The Suburban Review and co-manages Poetry Donut: The Melbourne Poetry Reading Group. In 2015, she received the Dinny O’Hearn Fellowship for her manuscript the ravage space. Her poems, reviews, and essays have been published in journals and anthologies including Cordite Poetry Review, Rabbit Poetry Journal, JEASA, Southerly and The Hunter Anthology of Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry. Her work often deals with diaspora, dialogue, exchange, and gross stuff. She lives in Narrm/Melbourne.
Anupama Pilbrow, Body Poems (dB3)
2018. 24pp. 120mm x 150mm ISBN 978-1-925735-10-9
deciBels series 3 (edited by Michelle Cahill and Dimitra Harvey)