Cassandra Atherton is a contemporary master of the prose poem as literary form, as deconstruction, as defamiliarization tactic. Throughout this stunning folio of prose poetry, transformation is a crucial subject for Atherton, particularly as the world and the characters that inhabit it are revealed as inherently unstable, and utterly changeable. But more importantly, Atherton has a gift for using form to transform language. By offering us pristine, orderly paragraphs, a faultless grammar, and strict margins, she ultimately offers us moments of beauty and metamorphoses in a place where we don’t expect to find it. Atherton uses form to set a readerly expectation–of order, or structure, of linearity–only to deliver the unexpected.
Cassandra Atherton is a widely anthologised prose poet and scholar of prose poetry. She co-authored Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton UP, 2020) and co-edited the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (Melbourne UP, 2020). She is currently writing a scholarly book on Ekphrastic Poetry for (Princeton UP, forthcoming) and a book of prose poems on the atomic bomb, with funding from the Australia Council. Cassandra is a Professor of Writing and Literature in Melbourne, Australia.