Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life

Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle

Giramondo 

ISBN 9781925818772

Reviewed by JOSHUA KLARICA

A technique commonly employed by poets is the announcing of the setting or theme of the piece in its title. Consider T. S Eliot’s poem ‘In a Station of the Metro’, whose title functions as a covert, preliminary line that allows the poem to maintain its effective couplet form. This device eliminates exposition in the work, and plants the reader in the thick of it immediately. Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle, the New Zealand writer whose first book Autobiography of a Marguerite takes the long poem form, utilises this same tactic in the title of her second work. Before we encounter the first words of Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life, the thesis has already been rambunctiously stated. Butcher-McGunnigle, it seems, insists that we view the impending labours of the unnamed protagonist through this prism, managing our expectations – ensuring we understand – before we read and, inevitably, pass judgment.

At once a dark, meandering comedy, at once a documentary of the stultified millennial, Butcher-McGunnigle’s second work follows the deadpan joys and luckless U-turns of a young woman navigating the trials and illusions of youth in an age where ennui seems a rite of passage. She idles time on dating apps, reads online horoscopes, and attempts to apply for jobs before reaching the cover letter and thinking “I can’t be bothered, I don’t care about this at all”. (p25) Any successes are swiftly undone, while any misfortune is short-lived: this is the recipe for getting by. 

While the denouement of the text revolves around securing an administration job at a bakery through a short-lived ménage à trois, the source proper lies amid a series of events not particularly concerned with forming a narrative at all. The text consists of short bursts of commentary, noting moods, whims, and events, usually little more than a paragraph in length, although on rare occasion these break onto a second page. This book of vignettes, although this is a loose term here, might be an exercise mandated by her therapist. They chart, comment, and record the events of a life waiting to get going. 

It is initially challenging to determine whether this is boredom palpable, or rather a languishing attributable to the rising challenges of mental health. There is dry pathos here: “I’m still experiencing cognitive dissonance regarding the heater I bought” (p8). This same humour is bundled into a cry for help: “I’m trying to stop sleeping with a towering pile of clothes on my bed so now I’m sleeping with a towering pile of clothes on the floor instead”(p48). As the notes pile up, the narrator reports suffering from depersonalisation disorder and depression, the intense feelings of being outside of one’s body: watching instead of driving. This recasts any initial suspicions that this was an entitled, bored millennial moping and milling, but still, dealing only in sharp statements, Butcher-McGunnigle never truly invites the reader to know the subject.

Instead, the collages of text become confessions of one simultaneously trying to appraise and make sense of a situation. Not many can say with confidence that they “want to pick blackberries on a farm and then die”(p8), or that they want, this moment, to have scabs on one’s knees(p39). Yet for all their darkly droll commentary, these confessions give way to more sincere, and serious, realities. If having scabs is proof that we have lived, the gaining of that experience is another case altogether. Later, during an interview, our protagonist suddenly “can’t concentrate on anything” because her intrusive thoughts have inexplicably fixated upon her “ankles (being) gnawed open and bleeding, bones exposed”(p44). There is bravado in these lines, but it gives way easily. 

If one joy of the reading experience can be found in plugging the gaps and discerning what happens outside of the story presented, then there is an entire world that carries on beyond these short monologues, making the task of the literary synapse jump a rather difficult one. This isn’t to say that such a limitation necessarily works against Butcher-McGunnigle here. While the fragmentary, oscillating nature of narration might not appear particularly cohesive, the blunt imagery claiming the protagonist’s days is thoughtful. Late one night, for example, while fending off the internal machines that question what she is doing with her life, she is struck by an ad for a mop. Later, she feels compelled to mop up a mess herself, or sweep dust into a pile. It might seem ridiculous, like wanting to walk down a very long driveway, but at least it is something to counteract, through any means possible, the feeling of uselessness. Throughout the text, Butcher-McGunnigle is deftly at work arguing that almost anything can have purpose, so why is it that we can struggle so much to find it?

Another equally dark and unnamed heroine suffering a similar anxiety can be found in Otessa Moshfegh’s much appreciated 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Only, where Moshfegh’s protagonist ends up losing a year, Butcher-McGunnigle’s is so helplessly aware of each ridiculing second as it takes an age to pass. This is a take on modern anxiety that exceeds Moshfegh’s effort, in part (and noting that the heroines are separated by two decades), because Butcher-McGunnigle makes it clear that life, irresistibly, goes on elsewhere. One of the great strengths of Butcher-McGunnigle’s subtlety is the way the external cast – a host of nostalgic-laden folks including ex-boyfriends, high school bullies and siblings – become osculating matter in the protagonist’s orbit, whose episodic appearances work to chastise her own effort at getting on with it, while reinforcing the absurdity of doing just that. Butcher-McGunnigle unveils the hilariously twisted idiosyncrasies employed to handle the increasingly native experience of lackadaisy, like scamming Airbnb or securing one’s place in an elusive pyramid scheme.

This mode of commentary is calculated, refined so it reflects a persona under siege of review and hyperaware of its own subjectivity. It is life in the internet age – bite-sized content that excels at the entertaining and the forgettable. In an endemic example, our protagonist is ovulating, and laments that

[n]o one’s giving me any attention so I make an apple pie at midnight. I spray multi-purpose cleaner on the pie and it shines and then it gets soggy. Last week I had sex with an orphan. But we fell out before I could give him his birthday gift. (p38)

Beyond the jocular and the intimate, for better or for worse, this is how she wants to be seen. Reading these episodes becomes an exhibition, and so hints at the works compelling theme: in what spaces do we exist, and what dictates them? Horoscopes, Tarot readings, Myers-Briggs personality tests, and a litany of online chats informs Butcher-McGunnigle’s protagonist of a particular sense of self, and how she and others view it. 

There is much space between these episodes to which we are not privy, meaning these episodes, their scarcity, their intensity, is highly selective. As a result, Butcher-McGunnigle’s work tussles over the roles we should be performing, but not necessarily those that we do. Sure, there are the more obvious episodes Butcher-McGunnigle wants us to note on the matter: “When he’s fucking me I am thinking about what would be an easy but nutritious lunch option for him” (p15). Then there other, subtler evidences of her poor, somehow inaccurate performances of being, like when the Mystery Shopper she is sleeping with insists they can’t both be INFP’s, or the interviewer for a teaching role suggests they instead brainstorm some other vocations for which she might be suited. Yet our heroine has all the attributes that suggest she should be, or at least can be, successful. A writing career, even though it has stalled here; pregnancy, though not seen through; a deep and very mixed bag of suitors that find her attractive and endearing but succumb themselves to obnoxity and online currency; her own intelligence, in spades that can’t find the matching outlet – she is sharp and useful as a blade kept behind inch-thick display glass. So, it isn’t so much a matter of finding someone to say I love you to, but rather in finding a way to value the act itself. 

Before we begin Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle’s second work, we are asked to assume that nostalgia has to some effect shaped the story that follows. Be it warm liminality or useless retreat, we are immediately called upon to approach the text with our prejudices for or against nostalgia in hand. But by works end, this initial outpost seems rather ham-fisted, for nostalgia in these pages cannot simply reference halcyon throwbacks. Rather, it reflects a time when we were unencumbered by the dictates of our performance. 

Nostalgia emerges when we look back. It is difficult to unsee. “I just want to be in a ball pit in a McDonald’s playground,”(p80)admits the young-but-too-old female in the closing passages. Yet the way is shut, and now even the longing for this kind of easier, familiar passage becomes its own performance. But everything is fleeting, we know this much, which has both a kind of crestfallen truth and surprising optimism to it: this too shall pass.

The Pigeons Are Taking Over: The Kindness of Birds

by Merlinda Bobis

ISBN 9781925950304

Spinifex Press

Reviewed by WINNIE DUNN

Ibis

The beloved bin chicken is always feeding off scraps of bread whenever I walk to Fairfield station. Because it is a sin to throw away the sacredness of bread, those leftovers become a well-meaning gesture shared by members of the south-west Sydney community. I clutched my copy of The Kindness of Birds (Spinifex, 2021), a short story collection by Merlinda Bobis, as I watched the ibises peck peacefully between pigeons for crumbs. 

Short stories are like ibises. Ibises are displaced from their homes due to global warming yet they still choose to stay in large groups and consistently work towards common goals. Likewise, short stories are in themselves self-contained. But when interconnected, their morals, moments and memories take over time and space in a deliberate way for the reader. Short stories aggregate like a flock (Bobis’ collection has 14 individual stories) and yet are shunted to the margins when one thinks of books (short story collections are the least sold or noticed in our industry). 

It is the image of the ibises gathering together which I carried into my reading of Bobis’ latest work. Her collection is a series of small gestures, revelation of cultures and feathered symbolism that make up the book’s overall theme – kindness and its many forms in the face of adversity. 

Pigeon

The title of this review takes inspiration from Vietnamese-Australian writer, Shirley Le. It was her narrator’s opening line in our co-written play, Sex, Drugs & Pork Rolls (UTP, 2021). Used as a symbol for British colonialism, the pigeons flock at the narrator’s Yagoona home window, leaving  dirty marks on the glass. Yet, the pigeon is remarked by the narrator’s mother as “much nicer” than the native magpie – the magpie in this sense being used as a symbol for First Nations people’s sovereignty, which was never ceded. As migrant settlers who are writers, it is a constant privilege to know how best to respect this sovereignty, when and where to tell our own stories, and when we are taking up too much space. 

In this way, Bobis acknowledged and paid respect to First Nations people’s sovereignty throughout her collection. The stories ‘Candido’s Revolution’ and ‘My Tender Tender’ especially speak to the complex history of colonialism, migration and sovereignty on this continent. 

It is the singing of a folksong, reimagined by a Filipinx poet named Remy, that stays with me as I read ‘Candido’s Revolution’. An infamous Manilaman pearl diver hums from atop a tree, “Dandansoy bayaan ta icao” (p54), capturing the attention of Mary (1893 Australia would simply refer to her as “a native woman”). Without a shared language between them besides the complimentary phrase, “Can-do good song” (p55) they still look at each other through the trees. The initial allure they shared is eventually cut short by racist laws and the call for a revolution in the Philippines. For The Kindness of Birds, this interaction marks the historical beginning of inter-cultural dialogue between First Nations people and Filipinx migrants – a connection that is often left unrecognised. 

This connection continues in the short story, ‘My Tender Tender’. One of the main characters Uncle Freddy Corpus, swears on the Bible when he tells Nenita of their shared Asian ancestry – she Filipina and he Filipino and Yuwuru. After telling stories to Nenita of miraculous feats of diving to survive the perils of colonialism, Uncle Freddy Corpus eventually “takes out various memorabilia from [a] satchel. He opens one: it’s a copy of a marriage certificate of his Filipino grandfather Servo Corpus Felipe and Yawuru grandmother Maria Emma Ngobing. She’s speechless, honoured […] touched by this gesture affirming their Philippine connection.” (p82) In this way, Uncle Freddy and Nenita’s intercultural dialogue shows how us settlers should act as we walk on stolen lands – nothing but intent listeners, sharing only when asked and only when it will foster healing. 

Colonialism would have us all believe that there are only pigeons at the centre of history, Bobis’ writing shows us how wrong that is. 

Common mynah

In Tongan culture, an omen of death arrives in the form of a bird entering our houses. One summer, a common mynah flew into the open doors of the top-storey balcony and flittered in circles on the living room ceiling. Even with the doors wide open, the petite brown blur still struggled to find the exit again. ‘Shoo-shoo-shoo!’ my aunty Lahi pleaded, her doughy belly rolling as she battered a straw broom above her head, hitting the plastic chandelier as she did so. ‘Fuck!’ Lahi swore, sweat dripping from her short strands of brown-black hair and into her freckled and frumpled face. Hearing someone swear, (that someone being technically my mother in Tongan culture), made me stifle a giggle. The mynah gave a series of squeaks before finally finding the open balcony. I watched as its fluffed mass disappeared over the streets of Mt Druitt. 

Within the short story ‘When the Crow Turns White’, a half-dead bird is carried into parliament injured from the hailstorm raging outside. Two cleaners of Filipinx heritage, Orla and Corazon, wrap the crow in white cloth remarking, “Climate change is scary.” (p14) Throughout their debates in the empty chamber rooms about legislations, the constant arguing of old white men and the winds of change with the first Aboriginal woman elected into the house of representatives, Corazon holds a secret. She is a descendant of crows, a unique culture connection that makes her a born healer. From acts of miracles long ago, she still has memorised the chant, “Ilayog, ilayog ang ilo sa bagà. Ilayog, ilayog ang sakit ni padabà. Fly, fly away the poison in the lungs. Fly, fly away the pain of the beloved!” (p20)

So what happened when the mynah visited us? My grandmother died a week later from a heart attack. 

And what happened when the crow flew up in a bundle of white cloth within our parliament? A series of “bipartisan”, “polite” and “caring” (p25) MPs across the political spectrum seemingly overnight. 

Why? Only the birds know.

Bat

The mammal (not a bird) that started COVID (racists love to use this as an excuse to call east and south-east Asian people “dirty”). The pandemic is threaded throughout Bobis’ short story collection – a grandmother and grandson are quarantining in an apartment together after returning from a trip to the Philippines (‘Grandma Owl’), a lover’s well-meaning yet blasé attitude towards mask-wearing (‘My Love, My Nerūsē’) and a nurse holding a pained patient’s hand even as it went against protocol (‘Angels’). It is these small gestures, hidden between dialogue, that readers should pay close attention to when reading The Kindness of Birds. Bobis’ work on the subject reveals it was not COVID that reshaped our society but rather all the small acts of kindness individuals chose in order to look after each other. 

Pelican

The only school assignment my father ever helped me with was a cardboard presentation about pelicans I did in Year 2. We printed out blurry Google images of the impossibly large white birds and glued them (using a mixture of flour and water) onto purple cardboard we bought at the Plumpton Newsagency for two bucks. 

My favourite story in Bobis’ collection is ‘My Father’s Australia’. Nenita (a recurring character), stares at the tailored suit she had once bought for her father. The suit, a pasalubong (homecoming gift), was given to her father with the intention that he would wear it when he took his first steps in Australia. In its navy hues, Nenita remembers how her father lived “on tilted earth” (p91) at the base of volcano in Legazpi, fixing people’s aircons in order to provide a better future for his children. In the suit, Nenita hears the memory of her father reciting in English, “To Oz, to Oz”(p92) for a trip that would never eventuate. 

The love between Nenita and her dad reminds me of the only time in my childhood when my father was not existing in survival mode (being a Tongan man with eight children would do that). When we spoke of pelicans, he seemingly had all the time in the world for me as we took our first steps in my education together. ‘To uni, to uni,’ my father, who dropped out of Year 12, would remind me after each school year ended. 

In this way, ‘My Father’s Australia’ is the standout of the collection. 

Blue-and-gold macaw

It was only when I moved to Fairfield in south-west Sydney that I saw the native parrot of South America. The suburb is home to a small yet strong Latinx Australian community. But it still didn’t make sense to me how the blue-feathered bird the size of a small television was caged away in a dilapidated second-storey balcony. 

What I found the most striking about Bobis’ writing, was how effortlessly she was able to reflect the true diversity of Australia without it ever feeling like it was forced or there simply for the sake of it. A woman Nenita passes by when swimming at the beach yells out “Jidoo!” (p222), Grandma Lou’s Chilean neighbour Matilda is the only person that calls Lou by her real name “Luningning” and reminds readers that as people of colour we’re always being interrogated for our skin, our accent and our names (p174). Nenita with her Latvian partner, who is always leaving her sweet notes like, “Gone walking. ♥” (p138) – a gesture that makes all the difference when choosing to grow old with someone. All realistic depictions of the inter-cultural connections we all share with neighbours, friends and even family. 

Halfway through my reading, I took a break and went outside onto my own second-storey balcony. I stared at the yellow underside of the parrot. Still wondering why on Earth a giant South American bird was flapping its wings with the sound echoing off the brick and concrete of endless rundown apartments. Laughing as I realised I was standing beside my own cultural marker – a potted frangipani tree.  

Rainbow lorikeet 

To me, the lorikeet is the kindest bird there is. Eternally squawking in bushes as if laughing. Eating with such fever and frenzy because they’re so cheerful that they hardly notice what is in their beaks. Darting in pairs across busy streets. Flocking in the afternoon sky so fast they become little black spots, dotting the daytime like stars. From Orla and Corazon, Lou and Matilda, Ella and Nenita and finally Remy and Belen – it was the sacred sisterhood of the women characters Bobis’ paired together that carried this collection. Remy put it perfectly in ‘The Air of The Times’ when she penned in poem: 

“So enter, sister,
without gun or armour,
still magnificent.” (p52) 

If the ibis is what I took into my reading of The Kindness of Birds, the Rainbow lorikeet is what I took away from it, long after I had turned the last page.

WINNIE DUNN is the General Manager of Western Sydney based literacy movement, Sweatshop. She is a writer of Tongan descent from Mount Druitt and holds a Bachelor of Arts from Western Sydney University. Winnie’s work has been published in the Sydney Review of Books, Griffith Review, Meanjin, SBS Voices, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Red Room Poetry and Cordite. She is the editor of several critically acclaimed anthologies, and currently working on her debut novel as the recipient of a CAL Ignite grant.

Everything, all at Once

Ultimo Press

Sydney, 2021

ISBN 9781761150173

Reviewed by H.C. GILFIND

Everything, all at Once presents fiction and poetry from the ‘thirty writers under thirty’ who won the inaugural Ultimo prize in 2021. This prize asked entrants to explore the theme of ‘identity’—a pertinent choice, considering how central and contested particular identities (and the notion of identity itself) have become in cultural and political conversations. This theme is also apt, of course, for a collection that offers young people a stepping-stone in their journey to ‘come of age’ both as individuals and as professional writers. 

Each piece in this collection is preceded by its author’s biography as well as (with a few exceptions) a photo. This format is striking, not only because of George Saad’s vibrant design, but because authorial identity is usually presented by publishers in a more understated, post-textual manner. Whilst this format surely reflects the publisher’s desire to celebrate these writers alongside their writing, this foregrounding of authorial identity might also be intended to provoke readers to question how they read. Does writing on the theme of identity oblige an author to disclose (aspects of) their own? Should fiction and poetry be read in relation to an author’s biographical information? Does such information influence intra- and inter-textual interpretations? Or does a reader’s awareness of such information dissipate once they are immersed in a worded-world? 

With its central concern about the increasingly ‘performative’ nature of society, Seth Robinson’s ‘Watch me’ is a fitting story to open this collection. This story reveals a dystopian world where everyone is driven to perform their selves for ‘all-important Likes and LOLs’ (13)—so much so that they risk self-erasure. Is this the drum-beat to our lives, now: ‘Watch, watch, watch me’ (16)? Is our prime goal, now, to worship—or become—a ‘LED deity’ (16)? Is this ephemeral identity all that the world has left to offer young people? This story powerfully evokes the pain, paralysis and yearning that consumes ordinary people as they see human life and emotion commodified (or ignored) by increasingly pervasive—creepily invisible—techno-capitalist powers. 

Georgia Rose Phillips’ ‘New Balance’ is a witty and poignant reflection on the nature of love in this performative landscape. The narrator actively seeks a psychologist who will assist—rather than stop—her self-mutilating behaviour. She likes this psychologist who allows her to indulge in ‘vicarious entanglement’ (112) with her ex’s new life, which is painted with digital ‘spatters of self’ (110) online. Instead of trying to fix or improve her, this psychologist’s novel therapy is to accept the narrator as she is. Being oneself is a radical act in this story—as it is across the collection. 

Amelia Zhou’s ‘Bright’ tells the surreal tale of a woman who shuns public performance altogether. In a scorched world, where people are spot-lit by a never-setting sun, the protagonist slathers herself in sunscreen behind drawn curtains. She peeks out at her neighbours’ ‘durational performance’ (75) which is full of laughter, talk, play and endless, mindless barbequing (of food and themselves). Watching them, she feels ‘hungry and thirsty’ (74) and envious of their casual conspicuousness: such ‘visibility’ (72) is denied her, and she feels herself disappearing into an unwitnessed purposelessness. Is performance—in and for the sight of others—the only way to exist in this world? 

Charlotte Snedden’s story presents a woman who actively seeks overt performance. In a theatre group, where her role is explicitly scripted and choreographed, her self-splitting anxiety disappears and she can return her self to her body: momentarily, she escapes her ‘Schrödinger’s mental health crisis,’ where she is present and absent all at once (82). Amy Duong’s teenage protagonist also yearns for clearly scripted roles, seeking them in the theatre of work where she is directed by the ‘calm authority’ (65) of men: ‘Dennis had assigned her a new identity… and in that mould, she had finally been made real’ (62). Meanwhile, Matilda Howard’s protagonist explores the roles played in the traditionally feminine theatre of a wedding. Here, a young woman observes people jangling with the ‘shadow-bones’ (126) left by barely-masked pain and disappointment. By the end of the day—having endured the event’s swirls of fear, bullying, and status-anxiety—she can hardly remember her own name.

Vivien Heng’s ‘Now Only Colour Lives’ is a tightly-crafted story of a girl who speaks to the persistent ghosts of family. Like a number of pieces in the collection, this story shows a young person struggling to bear the ‘blood-soaked memories’ (22) that are inherited across generations: ‘… all that screaming, the kind that could make the stars blink… My childhood was no place for a child, so I was born old’ (25). The calm poetic language of this piece is tensely juxtaposed against the ‘raging heart’ (24) of its narrator, effectively evoking the self-repression that enables an already-wounded person to survive a country that might one day accept them—if they bleed out their Colour (27). 

Themes of race, migration and colonialism are also—and especially—present in the collection’s poetry. Dženana Vucic’s ‘Povratak/Return’ is an elegantly crafted sequence that tracks the shifting seasons of a daughter’s reunion with her father in a war-battered Bosnia, subtly exploring the ‘matryoshka reveal’ (138) of (re)learning how to relate to family and homeland alike. Gavin Yuan Gao’s poem forces readers to imagine being a ‘yellow-peril soul’ (144) in Covid times, when being Chinese in Australia suddenly means having ‘… an origin story no one wants / to hear.’ In this context, individuals suddenly represent both ‘an entire land’ (145) and a ‘devil who’s out spreading / his sick of sin’ (144). Alice Bellette’s ‘Blak Tourmaline’ addresses racism and colonialism with forceful refrains and pointed use of the second person: ‘i am here because i survived. / people like you don’t want me to survive’ (155). The concluding lines of her poem (‘it is not about me / it is about country,’ 165) resonate powerfully with a phrase in Gurmeet Kaur’s poetic dissection of the good migrant’s plight: ‘… This is not about / me. This is about you projecting onto me’ (178). All of these writers explore similar themes, but in very different ways and across very different contexts.

Ismene Panaretos’ story, ‘A Flake,’ also looks at how cultural and generational differences collide. ‘There’s no honesty in adulthood’ (94) the narrator laments, and reflects upon the banality of their friends’ Instagrammed lives. In this world, where gender reveal parties have become a norm, a person might become a ‘small time scandal’ (97) just for being who they are: ‘I feel like I will split in two’ (98). This story shows, however, that differences can disappear when people are most vulnerable: do we need to understand each other, to care about each other? Sebastian Winter’s poem also explores how questions of sex and gender can—or cannot—bridge intergenerational divides. In this poem, the transgender narrator’s grandmother warns them that their hormones will ‘berrate’ (185) them. The narrator labours to remain unaffected by the woman’s relentless ‘inquisition’ (185), though refuses to ‘justify’ how their ‘heart loves’ (184), and quietly decides that, in a world built from pink and blue, ‘purple will do’ (185). Franklyn Hudson’s ‘They’ painfully shows how the most brutal violation of a person’s bodily autonomy can forever change that body’s meaning: ‘My breasts are the worst part of me. / When I look at them I can’t ever stop seeing him…’ (203). The reader hopes, alongside these narrators, that they can find what they yearn for: a place in this world to ‘exist in’ (207).

The stories and poems mentioned here do not fully convey the variety of concerns and literary styles this collection offers, and readers will also discover skilful, sharply-observed and sensitive writing by Amy Taylor, Andy Kovacic, Jamaya Plackowski, Cassandra-Elli Yiannacou, Natasha Hertanto, Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn, Madeleine Gray, Robert Juan Kennard, Cherie Baird, Jennifer Nguyen, Shane Scriven, Aishah Maryam David, Josie/Jocelyn Deane, Coco Stallman and Lora Subotic. Together, these authors’ voices unite to make Everything, all at once a compelling polyphonic investigation of how ‘identity is everything and nothing’ (Quanita, 191) in a world whose seductions and coercions are often as ambiguous as they are utterly overwhelming. 

Information about the Ultimo prize can be found here:  https://www.ultimopress.com.au/ultimo-prize

H.C. GILDFIND is the author of Born Sleeping (Miami University Press, 2021) and The Worry Front (Margaret River Press, 2018). hcgildfind.com/@ltercation