Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Uncategorized Goodbye to all that Keri Glastonbury ‘You’re the reason why I’ll move to the city, you’re why I’ll need to leave’ — Sharon Van Etten Driving over Styx Creek, appropriately laden with heavy metal, the TAFE maintaining a cold shoulder, where transgender trainee librarians from Kurri, meet Penny Wong’s ex-speech writer, meet all the dropkicks. Like watching Orange is the New Black thinking there but for the grace of god (& now whenever I think it’s in Pennsatuckey’s accent). The city’s lazily retooled past lives of a near future as I simply reach my nose around the back of my head, the slurry of toxic carcinogens leach from the gasworks, hidden in full public view. Outside parents are waddling their kids to school, and, for a minute there, we could be in the East Village. Seeking neither the uniform distancelessness of the network nor the uniform nearness of suburbia – all the disavowed derelict land, the perfect setting for an eat dirtzian doctorate. Mojo may have long left town but there’s still a few Los Chucos Suaves hiding in the native grasses, the world inside Clyde Street. Keri Glastonbury Keri Glastonbury is a poet, essayist and senior lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle. She is also former poetry editor of Overland. More by Keri Glastonbury › 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.
