Additional information
by Dominique Hecq (Author)
Otopos unfurls a paradox: the interleaving and entangling
of self and topos. It began with a loss of equilibrium
impelling rhythmic departures, an incipient blood beat--
subcutaneous, through the feet all the way to the surface
of the page. A Belgian native, I live and write on unceded
Wurundjeri land in an inner-city suburb of Melbourne.
This makes me a paradox. An unsettled European out
of place in a neighbourhood she calls home with its
fenced, stolen and, too often, desecrated land. Who bears
witness to political abstractions and aberrations yet fails
to wholly reimagine or rematerialize these through poetry
despite her attempt to uncover the regimes of terror of
settlement perpetrated by the symbolic. Whose breath
catches again and again.
Otopos is a reckoning, an elegy, an ode to the Merri
Creek trail that snakes through Melbourne's northern
suburbs and colluvial slopes, teaming with native flora and
fauna, but also imported weeds and predators, including
humans. In its arrangement in three parts, the collection
unfolds displaced fragments and glimpses of histories
through call and response of landscapes and beings. The
poetics active here is a poetics of the liminal: from word
to word, line to line, space to space the narrative persona
writes its shoreless existence, roaming as it does through
lexicons and topographies.
