When he asks what kind of work I do, I tell him I am a poet.
'Poetry will break your heart,' he says.
'Or, perhaps it is the only thing that won't,' I say.
In this startling work of autofiction the unnamed narrator plunges us headlong into 1990s Melbourne bohemia—a whirlwind of friends and strangers, decadence and despair, sex and drugs—through the places she slept: a boarding house with drug-addled landlord, share houses of aspiring artists and petty criminals, and roughing it on the streets.
She lives for poetry and hungers for beauty, purpose and a place to anchor herself. Her voice is ironic, deadpan and darkly comic, an Artline marker her weapon of choice in expressing her presence in a city both richly accommodating and indifferent.
Libby Angel's brilliant new work is filled with characters you'll wish you knew and those you're glad you don't. Where I Slept is an unforgettable portrait of a life on the fringes, a poem of longing and desire.
Libby Angel is an Australian poet and novelist. She won the 2018 Barbara Jefferis Award for her debut novel, The Trapeze Act. Her poetry has appeared in multiple Australian journals.
