Published in Overland Issue 229 Summer 2017 · Uncategorized After the festival Fiona Wright I tend to judge the wildness of a night by how often you say bitches. There always used to be a car, at least, on fire. There’s that obsession with morbidity: I’m fed up with poets today. Spell megalomania. Spell acquiesce. You pretend to be all hardcore but you’re just a bruised apple. I escaped to buy toilet paper. Mine is reverse-cycle. How fucking dare he make us fucking feel this way? The abstract noun of a concrete noun. You had the mushrooms last year. I’m not sure if it’s a changing of the guard. That’s overzealous cleaning, anyway. Read the rest of Overland 229 If you enjoyed this poem, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year Fiona Wright Fiona Wright’s new essay collection is The World Was Whole (Giramondo, 2018). Her first book of essays Small Acts of Disappearance won the 2016 Kibble Award and the Queensland Literary Award for nonfiction, and her poetry collections are Knuckled and Domestic Interior. More by Fiona Wright › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 17 June 2026 · The university Financial power in the public university: the case of ANU Beck Pearse The deeper problem is institutional. Universities have elaborate mechanisms for scrutinising knowledge claims circulating between staff and students. But we have remarkably weak mechanisms for scrutinising the financial assumptions through which executive power is exercised. 1 15 June 202616 June 2026 · Reviews Transubstantiations: Toby Fitch’s Or Grace Roodenrys The final trick of Or is that in the end it stages something utterly universal: the search for a momentary recognition of ourselves in language, the maybe-hopeless pursuit of those “very exceptional circumstances” in which something half-truthful might be said, the unending attempt to build something that feels real with the limited resources one has. This is a very old, a very sacred enterprise. We might call it poetry.
