Rallying
Quinn Eades
Rallying was written alongside Quinn Eades’s first book, all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body, and before he began transitioning from female to male. A collection very much concerned with the body, and the ways in which we create and write under, around, without, and with children, this collection will resonate deeply with anyone who has tried to make creative work from underneath the weight of love. This is a collection of poems that are more than poems. They were written with children, under babies, around grief, amongst crumbs, on trains, with hope: with love. This is a book made of steel and honey, muscle and sun, with tongues. Open its pages and you will find more than poetry. You will find moments in time strung across by text, a poetics of the space between bodies, the way that language makes us separate and simultaneously whole.
AWARDS
Won - 2018 Mary Gilmore Award
Praise for Rallying:
Quinn Eades’s poetry is an important part of the continuum of the development of language in relation to gender, the body, language and the expression of the self. In Rallying, his use of direct language is refreshing. Nothing is too tricky or try-hard-clever so that reading these poems is an amazingly clear experience. Even when he is writing exacting descriptive details there’s a clarity and a space for feeling to complement the imagery or the thinking... These poems go against cool, conceptual fashionability. Not many contemporary poets are currently writing embodied poetry and no one is writing quite like Quinn Eades. Rallying’s close concern with the female body - especially maternal bodies and relational feeling and thought - is a welcome and distinctive addition to the field of Australian poetry.
PAM BROWN
Quinn Eades’s writing is poignant and heartbreaking. In a climate of high poetic abstraction, these are refreshing, human poems.
JESSICA WILKINSON
Rallying is a generous, full-hearted non-stop call upon experience to tell us what we might need to hear as we make of ourselves what we can, as we change our lives, as we share the smell of two bodies as lovers, as parents with babies, as we inhabit houses that tire of us or celebrate us. From the beggar that wanted to be kissed, to the five-year-old who remarked, ‘I just keep moving my legs’ as he scaled a mountain, to the sequins that are still stars, these poems know how to sing truly. This is poetry that shows how tough, how sensitive, and full of life free verse still can be.
KEVIN BROPHY
Rallying confronts our notion of ‘normality’ through a searingly honest blend of stream-of-consciousness prose and free verse enjambment, where shifting poetical forms also reflect a transition in identity and gender. Throughout, Eades engages us by navigating these spaces in full view, simply stating: ‘I’m here’, and daring us to judge what that means.
PABLO MUSLERA, TEXT JOURNAL
This is a striking debut, heralding the arrival of a new voice in Australian poetry that has plenty to say and does so with a rare blend of research and lived experience, theory and memory.
HEATHER TAYLOR JOHNSON, TRANSNATIONAL LITERATURE
I hope that, in the years to come, Rallying by Quinn Eades and Les Belles Lettres by Gabrielle Everall are still celebrated as major contributions to field of Queer poetics. Both books delight, unsettle, arouse and challenge. They allow, even someone as old an conventional as me, to dream of a future where equality and diversity might just be not only possible, but also celebrated.
PHILLIP HALL, CORDITE POETRY REVIEW
Book details
PUBLICATION DATE: February 2017
FORMAT: Paperback
EXTENT: 128 pages
SIZE: 210 x 140 mm
ISBN: 9781742589190
RIGHTS: World rights
CATEGORY: Poetry, Quinn Eades, UWAP Poetry,