Slanted / Alison Glenny

Praise

/slanted is to me three things: one; a finely-made poetry of the eye, which becomes simultaneously and intensely a poetry of the ear and the echo, two; an historical poetry interested in the language of prior texts, and three; a deeply civilisational poetics, because it approaches English through a non-Western and anti-imperialistic lens. Combining these three things, Glenny is a marvellous and challenging Antipodean experimentalist.
—A.J. Carruthers

Glenny is as devoted to the ridges and valleys of the line and letter as her collection’s real-life muse and subject, climber Freda Du Faur, is to scaling the peaks. /slanted brings together paraphrase, erasure, shape and LANGUAGE poetry in an elliptical, challenging book. This is poetry that knows the power of form—of ordering, arrangement, selection—a collection that knows the power of placing one foot after another.
—Jake Arthur

/slanted feels created by hand and by foot. The hardened heels, the ice-cut steps and the glacier-wear (in this case, skirts!) are palpable, while the snow and stalactites and steep-angled slopes sprawl like obstacles across the page. Through it all, Freda Du Faur treads slowly over two-faced mountains, a “sporting female” battered by altitude and her time in history, straining to see but never knowing what she means to us now. Climbing becomes poetry, and poetry a way of climbing up and out of the past.
—Laura Williamson