Rallying

Winner of the 2018 Mary Gilmore Award

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. ***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