Böcker av Karen Throssell

Voracious is a mythical beast. He lives on profits and is always hungry. A Midas beast, all he touches becomes a commodity. He appears in or is hinted at throughout this collection of beautifully crafted poems. In her seventh poetry collection, Karen Throssell includes poems about obesity and anorexia, agribusiness, diets and fads, the supermarket duopoly, starvation as a weapon of war, food additives, ultra-processed food, gluttony and greed. So the book is about the politics of food, its transformation via the capitalist economy from produce to product, and the resultant rise in 'pretend food' - food which is highly addictive but has no nutritional content. The seriousness of the subject matter is lightened with the author's characteristic quirky wit, by the inclusion of 'odes' to various fruit and vegetables, poems about food and family, and food traditions. There is much to be discovered and much to smile at in this important and highly accessible book.

In this, her fifth poetry collection, Karen Throssell revisits similar links between the intensely domestic/ personal and the broader social and political worlds. But in The Dialectics of Rain there are not only new fields of interest - travel and place (Cuba, an Aboriginal settlement in the Northern Territory, and France); a wry and unflinching look at the generational phases of 'love'; and a series on race and terrorism. The work also experiments with form in a series of ekphrastic poems (looking at the interconnection between poetry and art, music, pottery and film) and a number of longer collage poems which weave poetry and prose.