The Exclusion Zone

'You don’ t remember this place. This land could be arid or hungry or wet or rot. That does not matter. Your memory can’ t tell you what no longer exists.' Beginning in the nuclear waste deposits of our future, The Exclusion Zone bears witness in a language degrading faster than the radioactive byproducts of our history and our present. At once prophecy and annihilation, these poems speak with ghosts, questioning how our words – and what they seek to preserve – can contend with the inevitability of their own decay. Nuclear materials drift throughout this collection, metastasising and resisting their own disposal. The Exclusion Zone is a poetry of warning, of sé ance, of incantation – a poetry of what survives, where the apocalypse-to-be manifests in human tenderness and vulnerability.

Shastra Deo was born in Fiji, raised in Melbourne, and lives in Brisbane. She holds a Bachelor of Creative Arts in Writing and English Literature, First Class Honours and a University Medal in Creative Writing, a Master of Arts in Writing, Editing and Publishing, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing from The University of Queensland. Her first book, The Agonist (UQP 2017), won the 2016 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and the 2018 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. Shastra Deo was born in Fiji, raised in Melbourne, and lives in Brisbane. She holds a Bachelor of Creative Arts in Writing and English Literature, First Class Honours and a University Medal in Creative Writing, a Master of Arts in Writing, Editing and Publishing, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing from The University of Queensland. Her first book, The Agonist (UQP 2017), won the 2016 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and the 2018 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal.

THE EXCLUSION ZONE It Survives Fukushima Soil Canto for Sumitomo Bank (Hiroshima Branch) Pavlovsk Station Post-detonation Linguistics How Deep Aubade (Earth-TRN688) Things We Inscribed in the Voyager Golden Record Frameshift Mutations Poem for My Son in the Years of a Hot War Corporeal Needs Questionnaire Baby Tooth Survey View of the Sky from an Imagined Lake in June Interlude (Creek Mouth) Undertakers of the Atom Przewalski’ s Horses Are Back in Belarus Irish Book of Spells Walkthrough THE GAME ROOM Transcript of a Fight Scene Self-portrait as Goro Majima Fishing at Caer a’ Muirehen Don’ t Look Down The Break The Act The Hanging On Learning a Dead Language Interlude (River Causeway) Something Ends Orichalcum The Question of an Ethical Shot THE LIGHTHOUSE Galatea Wakes Six Feet from Ground Zero On the Proper Disposal of Limbs Shastra Deo Sorry Grey Walk from Carseldine Station, September 2020 A Short Future of Deluge Interlude (Reservoir) How to Love Like a Horse The Task of Shooting Me While Making Love with a Combat Medic Lilac and Gooseberries Bone Nest Curse Poem Search History The Light’ s Winning Lychee Season Notes Acknowledgements