5.30PM THURSDAY 18 AUGUST 2018

Join us for the launch of Keri Glastonbury’s poetry collection Newcastle Sonnets, hosted by Rosemarie Milsom, director of Newcastle Writers Festival, and launched by Sam Twyford-Moore, author of The Rapids: Ways of Looking at Mania.

Once considered a masculine working-class heartland, Newcastle is now acclaimed as one of the top hipster cities of the world. In the sequence of sonnets that compose her homage to Newcastle, Glastonbury celebrates the city’s oddities and contradictions, remixing the material effects of gentrification with the vernacular of social media. An antipodean, regional, queering of Ted Berrigan’s New York-based The Sonnets, Glastonbury’s poems embrace the city’s DIY chutzpah and the swipes, likes and filtered screens of internet culture. This is Newcastle in cosplay mode, part eggs benedict, part pebblecrete, where a coal ship named ‘Fiction’ is being towed into the harbour.

Keri Glastonbury is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle. Her poems have been widely published in magazines and collections. She has been the recipient of the Australia Council’s BR Whiting Residency in Rome and an Asialink Literature Residency in India. Her previous poetry collections include Grit Salute (Papertiger, 2012).

Sam Twyford-Moore is the Director and CEO of the Melbourne Agency and the founding host of The Rereaders, a fortnightly literary and cultural podcast. He is a former Festival Director and CEO of the Emerging Writers’ Festival. The Rapids: Ways of Looking at Mania is published by NewSouth Books.

FREE EVENT, everyone’s welcome.