Author(s): Michaela Keeble

Poetry

Surrender is Michaela Keeble's remarkable first full-length collection of poems. It responds to the call of indigenous and other radical poets – as well as to the deafening silence in white poetry – to face our colonial past and our increasingly appropriative present. In challenging herself, Michaela's poems also challenge other white poets, writers and readers to consider the potential for violence in our voices, language choices and poetic positions. This work is sensual, and of the senses, balancing contradiction and paradox with what we know is real because of our ability to feel. The poems have a dancer's physicality, giving the reader multiple ways to experience the construction and deconstruction of whiteness and language. Michaela's poems interrogate the slippery, dangerous yet vital need "to belong". "One of the most important and welcome collections I've read." –Pip Adam