Toby Fitch, Where Only the Sky had Hung Before

Where Only the Sky had Hung Before disassembles and reassembles language found in the textual wastelands of the internet and the literary canon. Across many spectrums, from slippery lists of factoids to indices of figurative language, from a pantoum of #staywoke tweets to deep cuts and collage treatments of The Waste Land, The Argonauts, and The Left Hand of Darkness, these poems mobilise tensions and continuities between form and fluidity, gender and genre, literature and spam, childhood and adulthood, the virtual and the real.

“In Where Only the Sky had Hung Before, Toby Fitch practises a consummate alchemy. His poems—erasures, collages, supercuts, ghostings, inversions and more—transmute the material substances of literature, culture and lived experience, into new forms both playful and precise.” —Bella Li

“Among Fitch’s hybrid personae—‘fussily in the likeness of a mere man unfurling his inner lady’—his instantly charming mermaid guides us through fathoms of ingenious poetic recombinations that extend a long line of spirited experiment (Apollinaire, Mallarmé, Loy, Brennan, Edwards, Farrell, Howe, Carruthers &c). Some experiments here assay a conclusion—'We each consume 1 cubic metre (1000 litres) of poetry each year’. Top up
with this totally splendid book.” —Pam Brown

Toby Fitch is the author of four poetry collections: Rawshock (Puncher & Wattmann 2012), which co-won the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry; Jerilderies (Vagabond Press 2014); The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau (Vagabond Press 2016); and the pocketbook ILL LIT POP (Flying Islands/Cerberus Press, 2018); plus various chapbooks.

Born in London, Fitch grew up in Sydney, attending the University of Technology as an undergraduate, 2000–2005, and the University of Sydney as a doctoral candidate, 2011–2016. For his creative PhD he wrote his third book of poems, The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau, and a thesis, Themparks: Alternative Play in Contemporary Australian Poetry, which together won the Dame Leonie Kramer Prize in Australian Poetry, 2017. He is the current poetry editor for Overland, a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Sydney, and he runs the monthly poetry reading series at Sappho Books in Glebe. He lives in Sydney with his partner, two daughters and Staffordshire terrier, Minky. He tweets @Toby_Fitch.

Toby Fitch, Where Only the Sky had Hung Before
2019. 96pp. PB. 148mm x 210mm. Release date: TBA
ISBN 978-1-925735-32-1