Fiona Wright – February 24 2019

Fiona is an editor, critic and award-winning poet and essayist. She holds a PhD from Western Sydney University’s Writing and Society Research Centre. Fiona’s work has been published in Australian and international journals and anthologies, and her poetry has featured in several Best Australian Poems anthologies. Fiona’s prose works include Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays in Hunger, a collection of ten essays detailing her experience with anorexia at different stages in her life, and its follow-up, The World Was Whole. Fiona has held the 2007 Island of Residencies placement at the Tasmania Writers’ Centre and she was the 2017 Copyright Agency (CAL) New Writer in Residence at the
University of Technology, Sydney.

Knuckled
Giramondo Press, 2011; ISBN 9781920882754
The poems in Knuckled are themselves bony and assertive, stripped down to the detail, which appeals in its physical quality and the manner in which it is offered, as much as in its compression of feeling. There is a strong sense of the social in Wright’s focus and selection: her details embody attitudes, prejudices, anxieties, identifications; they evoke the histories and mythologies embedded in family lore; and they carry an awareness of belonging in place. The poems range from the flooded towns of the Snowy Mountains to the burnt-out landscape of Victoria to the holiday beaches of coastal NSW. One sequence is set in Sri Lanka, and compares the poet’s and her grandfather’s different experiences of Asia – other poems pursue this experience in Cambodia, Vietnam and Indonesia. But it is the suburbs of Western Sydney, where the poet grew up and now works, that is her particular territory, with its mixture of voices and perspectives rendered all the more intensely for the fact that it is done with such a strict economy of means.

Domestic Interior
Giramondo Publishing, 2017; ISBN 9781925336566
Many of the poems in Domestic Interior were written around the same time as Fiona Wright’s award-winning collection of essays Small Acts of Disappearance, and they share with that work her acute sensitivity to the details that build our everyday world, and hold us in thrall, in highly charged moments of emotional extremity. Anxiety lurks in domestic spaces, it inhabits the most ordinary objects, like a drill bit or a phone charger, it draws our attention to the bruised body and its projecting parts. The elements of language take on new intensity in a series of ‘overheard’ poems fraught with their speakers’ vulnerability and their attempts at resolution. Wright walks us through the places where this drama unfolds, in shopping centres, cafes, hospitals and bedrooms, in the inner-city suburbs of Sydney where the poet now lives, and the south-west where she grew up, presenting them as sites of love as well as sadness, and succour and strength as well as unease.